“Aiming for perfection causes frustration at best and paralysis at worst.”

Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face-and there will be barriers-be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold, and I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try.

It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.

I want to tell any young girl out there who’s a geek, I was a really serious geek in high school. It works out. Study harder.

In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.

We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.

So please ask yourself: What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it.

We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.

I wish I could just go tell all the young women I work with, all these fabulous women, ‘Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success.’ I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it’s not that simple.

If more women are in leadership roles, we’ll stop assuming they shouldn’t be.

So there’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance.

It’s hard to visualize someone as a leader, if she is always waiting to be told what to do.

We need to stop telling [women], “Get a mentor and you will excel.” Instead, we need to tell them, “Excel and you will get a mentor.

I tell people in their careers, ‘Look for growth. Look for the teams that are growing quickly. Look for the companies that are doing well. Look for a place where you feel that you can have a lot of impact.’

Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception. It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few.

Next time you’re about to call your daughter bossy, take a deep breath and say, ‘My daughter has executive leadership skills.’

Give us a world where half our homes are run by men and half our institutions are run by women. I’m pretty sure that would be a better world.

Patrice O’Neal is the best comic I ever saw.

The best teacher is an entertainer.

So maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.

You cannot always run at your best.

The Spurs boss is an honest Yorkshireman and you will go a long way before finding a straighter character than that. Bill has never wavered in his determination to give White Hart Lane fans the best.

Laughter is the best medicine, y’know, besides medicine.

I just hope I can get another personal best. If I can do that, I’ll be satisfied.

Those who stay will be champions