Anybody who runs is a VC. Anybody who stands still is a well-disciplined VC.

Chess teaches you to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good and it trains you to think objectively when you're in trouble

A satirist is someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to make some sort of a joke out of it. However brutal that joke might be.

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

You either connect or you don't connect. It's not the end of the world. It's a movie.