If you understand the independent worker, the self-employed professional, the freelancer, the e-lancer, the temp, you understand how work and business in the U.S. operate today.
Baseball just a came as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion.
In Britain, libel damages are small and people build them into the cost of doing business. In America, libel is very rare and much harder to prove, but the damages are enormous.
In some respects, the video-game business is a lot like the razor business, which follows a simple model: Give away the razor, gouge 'em on the price of the blades.
I didn't learn fire-eating to conquer my fears. I learned fire-eating because I desperately wanted to be in show business.
The fact of the matter is that fewer people in Tokyo are able to do business in English than in many other big Asian cities, like Shanghai, Seoul or Bangkok.
TV journalism is a much more collaborative, horizontal business than print reporting. It has to be, because of the logistics. Anchors are wholly dependent on producers to do all the hustling.
We've had a chance to be seen by viewers who had never seen us before, and we've kept a lot of them.
In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.
If life is a video game, then most of us have no chance of winning, if by winning you mean succeeding in a quest or saving a princess.
Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.
I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
All I demand for the black man is, that the white people shall take their heels off his neck, and let him have a chance to rise by his own efforts.
The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
What is terrifying is the ability, through mass brainwashing or propaganda, to change normal human instinct, which does not necessarily contain very much hatred.
Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior - carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably.
One of the ways we women often handicap ourselves is thinking that once we've made a decision or a commitment, we can't change.
Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.
You can't hope for a better result as a campaigner than to have the prime minister announce a major policy change within 48 hours of your documentary.
Bill Gates is a relative newcomer to the fight against global warming, but he's already shifting the debate over climate change.
The pathological degree to which former Vice President Dick Cheney operated in secrecy led to government abuses that we'll probably spend years learning about.
