An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.

An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.

What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.

The best example of how impossible it will be for Major League Baseball to crack down on steroids is the fact that baseball and the media are still talking about the problem as "steroids."

Does that mean we should give up? Probably. But there are two issues worth considering. The first is - is it really true that drugs destroy the integrity of the game?

We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.

A handicap is like trying to race and you have a ten pound weight stuck to your waist. That is a handicap.

A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.

A runner needs not just to be skinny but - more specifically - to have skinny calves and ankles, because every extra pound carried on your extremities costs more than a pound carried on your torso. That's why shaving even a few ounces off a pair of running shoes can have a significant effect.

Age-class running, as you know, is completely unreliable. It's based on this artificial thing, which is that people who are the same age have the same level of physical maturity. Which just isn't true.

All my books are optimistic!

An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.

As a writer, the best mindset is to be unafraid.

Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.

Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.

Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.

I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research... for ways of augmenting story-telling.

I don't understand, given the constraints physicians have in doing their job and the paperwork demanded of them, why people want to be physicians. I think we've made it very, very difficult for them to perform their job. I think that's a shame.

I don't want a door bell. I don't want anyone ringing my door bell... seems to be intrusive. They can call me on their cell phones.

I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the heart of a Mennonite community. All my family are part of the Mennonite church.

I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.

I never had those dreams of making the Olympics. Never.

I try to be unafraid of making a fool of myself.

I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties.

I'm a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that's changed a bit.

I'm just trying to say that it should reassure us that the inevitable traumas of being human do end up producing some good. Otherwise, the human condition is overwhelmingly depressing.

I've had the most untraumatic life a human being can have. But I've always been drawn to those who have had far more complicated histories.

If Harvard is $60,000 and University of Toronto, where I went to school, is maybe six. So you're really telling me that education is 10 times better at Harvard than it is at University of Toronto? That seems ridiculous to me.

If I was President of the United States, I'd rather be right than interesting. If I was CEO of a company, I'd rather be right than interesting. But I'm a journalist - what journalist would rather be right than interesting?

If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: You're not the audience!

If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward. Otherwise, how would you ever do the thing that you are doing?

If you go to an elite school where the other students in your class are all really brilliant, you run the risk of mistakenly believing yourself to not be a good student.

If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening.

If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.

If you're last in your class at Harvard, it doesn't feel like you're a good student, even though you really are. It's not smart for everyone to want to go to a great school.

If you're skinny and you can't play hockey in Canada, you aren't left with a lot of options. I was left with running.

In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles - a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles.

In my mid-adolescence, my friend Terry Martin and I became obsessed with William F. Buckley. This makes more sense when you realize that we were living in Bible Belt farming country miles from civilization. Buckley seemed impossibly exotic.

It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.

It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.

Many people with dyslexia truly suffer, and their lives are worse off for having had that disability.

My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.

My mother read me biblical stories at night.

Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.

Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long.

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.

People in great institutions are occasionally credulous.

Rarely do we stop and consider whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest.