“I define talent as the rate at which you get better at something when you try. To be very talented means you get better faster and more easily than other people or other things that you try.”

I don’t think that every child in America is going to necessarily aspire to, you know, a four-year degree from a liberal arts college or a certain kind of life. I think that people should learn to be excellent in the thing that they choose to do.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.

Negative feelings are typical of learning, and you shouldn’t feel like you’re stupid when you’re frustrated doing something. You might say to yourself, ‘I can’t do this,’ but you should say, ‘That’s great.’ That means you really have the potential to learn something there.

You know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop – the idea that we’re going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.

What we reliably find is that people’s perseverance scores are actually higher than their passion scores, and I think it really does get to the fact that working hard is hard, but maybe finding your passion is even more difficult.

There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don’t want to let kids quit during a valley.

One of the challenges of commencement speeches is that you have this older, wiser person who is accomplished talking to young, not-yet-so-wise, not-yet-accomplished adults or, in high school or middle school, even younger.

Some of the things we do are great, but they often have these iterations that are not great. We screw up sometimes. We get rejected.

Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.

Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.

I think it’s very important to send the message that, while parents are needed to remind you to practice and occasionally force you to finish things… they also need to learn to respect you. You as an individual, ultimately, are the captain of where you’re going.

The most important thing parents can do, although it’s not the only thing they should do, is model the behavior they want from their kids.

It’s also stamina in your direction, stamina in your interests. If you are working on different things but all of them very hard, you’re not really going to get anywhere. You’ll never become an expert.

I do think that whatever ambition I may have had natively was amplified by my father’s clear valuing of it. I knew that was what my dad really cared about.

I worked hard as a teacher. But those are completely different career paths. And the lack of direction is why I didn’t get far enough in any of those things.

Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.

And no matter what’s happening in the Middle East – the Arab Spring, et cetera, the economic challenges, high rates of unemployment – the emotional, critical issue is always the Israeli-Palestinian one.

Such innovations have given Dubai a competitive edge and an accelerated growth rate that few could match.

I can assure you that I don’t wake up every day with a smile upon my face, and the distance from happiness in the morning isn’t set at a constant rate.

Do you know what our suicide rate would be if we didn’t have television? Do you know how much happiness I’ve brought to people who couldn’t get out of the house but could watch Love Boat?

Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.

A book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf – at any rate it is safer from criticism.

Rated R movies are few and far between, nowadays. We’re all seeing less and less rated R movies, and less and less of them are being made.

If we cannot agree, let us at any rate agree to differ, but let us part as friends.