Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

Much more than memoir; it's history.

One hates a person for the same reason one loves him

Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.

Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.