From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.

Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors... But I think they're quite positive when they're dynamic and do something new.

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

Technology just means information technology.

The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.

'Perfect competition' is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand.

It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.

I don't think success is complicated; if you do something that works, then it's a success.

An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.

Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.

Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.

When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life.

If you have a business idea that's extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem.

I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.

There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

I'm not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.

The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.

Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?

There's no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there's something about Silicon Valley.

I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.

You become a great writer by writing.

Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.