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A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his qualities.
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With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics read the footnotes and skip the text, and with business books skip both text and footnotes.
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Double a man’s erudition; you will halve his citations.
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Losers, when commenting on the works of someone patently more impressive, feel obligated to unnecessarily bring down their subject by expressing what he is not: “he is not a genius, but…”, “while he is no Leonardo” instead of expressing what he is.
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You are alive in inverse proportions to clichés in your writing.
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What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.
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Just like poets and artists, bureaucrats are born, not made; it takes normal humans extraordinary effort to keep attention on such boring tasks.
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The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers, painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail.
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It is a waste of emotions to answer critics; better to stay in print long after they are dead.
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I can predict when an author is about to plagiarize me, and poorly so when he writes that Taleb “popularized” the theory of Black Swan events.
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Newspaper readers exposed to real prose are like deaf persons at a Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while wondering, “what’s the point?”
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Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry), some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.
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The exponential information age is like a verbally incontinent person: he talks more and more as fewer and fewer people listen.
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What we call fiction is, when you look deep, much less fictional than nonfiction; but it is usually less imaginative.
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It’s much harder to write a book review for a book you’ve read than for a book you haven’t read.
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Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
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Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don’t understand, and those who write poorly about a subject they don’t understand.
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The information rich dark ages: In 2010, 600,000 books were published, just in English, with few memorable quotes; c. zero AD, a handful of books were written; in spite of the few that survived, with loads of quotes.
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In the past most were ignorant except for one in a thousand refined enough to talk to. Today, literacy is higher but thanks to progress, literacy, the media, and finance, only one in ten thousand.
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We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.
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Half of suckerhood is not realizing that what you don’t like might be loved by someone else (hence by you, later), and the reverse.
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It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.
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Literature comes alive when covering up vices, defects, weaknesses, and confusions; it dies with every trace of preaching.
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