Playwright

If you're in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what's going on around you.

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable.

We humans for millions of years were nomadic. We associated freedom and well-being with the ability to move into open spaces, to find places more suited to hunting.

While still working for others, your goal at some point must be to carve out little areas that you can operate on your own, cultivating entrepreneurial skills.

Female psychotic bosses can be particularly devilish. They will tend to mix in a lot of passive aggression, making you feel guilty for all kinds of things.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It's part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about.

Over the years I've met quite a few big rappers. Then it exploded with 50 Cent, and I did a book with him. It's always a strange meeting of two worlds, it's very exciting.

The great thing about America is that you can come from the worst circumstances and become something remarkable.

Compared to other animals, we humans enter the world remarkably weak and helpless. We remain relatively weak for many years before we can truly operate on our own.

I don't want to throw mud at anyone - I really admire Gandhi as a brilliant strategist - but Gandhi was pretty manipulative, you know.

If you want to be a good strategist, you can never just go off a principle you read in a book. You need to adapt what you do to the situation; no rule of thumb is true all the time.

Weak character will neutralize all of the other possible good qualities a person might possess.

Ethics and power are separate.

To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two - to fix your opponent's expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.

Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

On a career level, I always advise people to look ahead and be open to changes in direction. That job that seems so good now can easily turn into a nightmare if you do not see the possible corners it can land you in.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

What happens if you stick at something long enough, and study it for so long, you have a different kind of intelligence. It's not an intellectual thing. It's almost like an animal intelligence. I call it our form of instinct, almost how a lion knows exactly where its prey is.