Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision.

I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.

The single most important key to success is to be a good listener.

My aspirations were never anything other than I really, really admired certain singers over the years, and I just wanted to do the best I could. And that has been kind of like the way I've been fortunate enough to be able to have a career, have some success, and yet continue to learn my craft.

To me, the success of the cyberactivists in Tunisia is actually very interesting, because many of them explicitly rejected any support from Washington.

Well, one always has an instinct to be a painter, and I've done quite a lot of painting at one time or another, though not with any public success.