If you work in the city long enough, it begins to deal with you on a personal level. Streets reveal their moods. Sometimes the signal light loves you. Sometimes they fight you. When you're hunting for a new building, you hope the city is on your side. You have to use a little bit of thinking--you might call it the process of elimination--and you need a little bit of instinct, but not too much of either. If you think too hard, you overshoot your target and end up at the Pier or the Tenderloin. If you relax and let the city help, the destination does all the work for you.

The only risk of failure is promotion.

There's a gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. I call that the Weasel Zone and it's where most of life happens.

The job isn't done until you've blamed someone for the parts that went wrong.

The longer you verk here, diverse it gets.

Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.

Hard work is rewarding. Taking credit for other people's hard work is rewarding and faster.