“The Black Swan is probably the strongest statement of enlightened empiricism since Ernst Mach refused to acknowledge the existence of the atom.

“..a bubble is when people start doing things not because of fundamentals, but because others are doing them.

“I get it now; I didn’t get it then. That life is about losing and about doing it as gracefully as possible…and enjoying everything in between.

“How can my younger colleagues [in the press] truly appreciate a victory when they haven’t really known defeat?

“You can only close requests as they are implemented if you can find them, which in turn depends on closing ones you have no intention of implementing

“What makes wars start? Fights over water, changing patterns of rainfall, fights over food production, land use…There are few greater potential threats to our economies too…but also to peace and security itself.

“..all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan..

“Ripple is a variation on the concatenative theme of functional, stack-oriented languages such as Joy and Factor, and takes a multivalued, pipeline approach to query composition.

“Booksellers that publish their own titles benefit not from escaping the author’s copyright, but the previous publisher’s exercise of a grant of rights (limited, authors take note, to 35 years). “Freeing” a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, “The Garden Party,” while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

“Follett’s literary career has gone through four distinct phases.. Barring another radical shift in his literary output, his reputation is likely to rest on his early thrillers (especially Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca) and on The Pillars of the Earth, which he himself is said to regard as his finest work.