Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.
I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that.
I've been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs.
Scheduling down time as part of your routine is hard but worth it, personally, even professionally.
The thing is, in the dating profiles it says 'spiritual,' but not with a specific religion. And so I pretty much try to meditate, but I have a very hard time concentrating on things other than me.
I've had people break into profiles on my Internet; they got into my accounts. This was at the beginning of my career. There is a fair bit of alarm when something like that happens. It definitely bothered me a lot at the time. But you move on from these things.
As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important.
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person.
There are lots of different strategies that an animal can use to survive. What a worm does is try to convert food into worms as soon as possible. In three days a single worm produces 300 progeny. So why put your resources into developing if you can make a brand-new worm in no time at all?
We've been programmed, from the time that we were very, very little, about what we can't do - about what is impossible.
I'm not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they're supposed to, all the time.
One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.
Myths are a waste of time. They prevent progression.
Every time I go to these racial forums, it is people who are alike, or it is progressives and liberals. So I said, 'At some point, we've got to bring the progressives and the liberals and the conservatives together.'
It's very worrying at this time in the world that any point of view should be prohibited, that's banned, there are heretics that should be burned at the stake.
Regardless of what one's attitude towards prohibition may be, temperance is something against which, at a time of war, no reasonable protest can be made.
The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.
I'm not an extremely prolific writer. I don't write songs all the time.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
