I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.

Any time people come together in a meeting, we're not necessarily getting the best ideas; we're just getting the ideas of the best talkers.

The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting.

Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration . They're relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame.

you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

There are only a few people out there who can completely overcome their fears, and they all live in Tibet.

Introversion- along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness- is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living in the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.