The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.

Part of the magic of a startup is the fear of death. You have only so much money in the bank, and if you don't get to the right milestone before you run out, then the company goes under - it's over.

Death is something that I am still trying to figure out a healthy relationship with.

Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.