I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.
I spent a lot of time in the White House in the public areas where reporters are allowed to go, but I spoke to people about the private quarters as well. Some of the things I learned were small, novelistic details. For example, the fact that there we...
Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. 'To find y...
You don't have to work for Google, or any of the other firms encouraging staff to pursue personal projects on company time, to use slowness to unlock your creativity. Anyone can do it. Start by clearing space in your schedule for rest, daydreaming an...
The way the Establishment deals with people like me is to ignore them. When you become unignorable, they will try to smear you, and that's what I feared for a long time. Now I have somehow vaulted into this space where it's difficult for someone to s...
Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning...
To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and on...
We really spend a lot of time on building relationships. And so when everyone is like, 'How do you break so many stories?' it's because I build relationships. I do it the old-fashioned way, and I build sourcing relationships, and then I take advantag...
I would supplant the ox with the automobile and pave instead of plowing the fields. 1 have a theory that if a corn field were paved, leaving out a brick for each hill, it would increase the yield, do away entirely with the mud, and give the farmer pl...
You know what works in venture capital? A group of incredibly smart, connected people who have the financial wherewithal and risk appetite to make multi-million dollar bets on unproven ideas and inexperienced founders. People who can make decisions q...
There were high school coaches such as Charles Boston that took me under his wing and taught me the fundamentals of football. And when I went to college there was Robert Hill who took me there and he showed me what hard work and determination would d...
[Foster has just attacked the gang members on the hill] Bill Foster: What about the brief case? You forgot the brief case! I'm going home! So clear a path, you motherfuckers! Clear a path! I'M GOING HOME!
Henry Hill: [narrating] Jimmy had never asked me to whack somebody before - but now he's asking me to go down to Florida and do a hit with Anthony? That's when I knew I would never have come back from Florida alive.
Oddball: Who is that guy, Crapgame? Crapgame: Him? Name's Kelly. Used to be a lieutenant, pretty good one, too, till they gave him orders to attack the wrong hill. Wiped out a half a company of G.I.'s. Somebody had to get the blame and he got picked.
Theoden: Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. How did it come to this?
Nina Romina: In the future if you don't have anything, man up and stop dodging my calls. Lou Bloom: I have something, triple murder in Granada Hills. Nina Romina: That's just breaking now. Lou Bloom: I got there before the cops.
New York has arguably become the quintessential 1 percent city, a city that has been so given over to the rich that you now have to be rich to live here. Or not live here: New York's also a preferred destination for foreign money spent on vast, lifel...
It's rare that you have a policy issue that can be solved by throwing more money at the problem, but the technology to make bus service more frequent and equip buses with GPS systems that provide real-time schedule updates to bus stops exists and ope...
When I was older and I first started working, I was obsessed with buying my first Chanel jacket. I saved up my hard-earned money, went to Barneys, and bought a little black Chanel jacket. It saw many, many job interviews and many, many events. I'm no...
Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated i...
We live in a culture that's been hijacked by the management consultant ethos. We want everything boiled down to a Power Point slide. We want metrics and 'show me the numbers.' That runs counter to the immensely complex nature of so many social, econo...
