I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker.

Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.

I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

All art is theft.

I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999. Because you could see this coming. I haven't yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School.

I felt that I could look back on my life and think about lots of folks that I helped become better folks. And I've tried to be as good a man as I could be.

What's unique about the Mormon Church is that it encourages inquiry. I really do think my research and religion are all on the same page. I never could have come up with the notion of disruptive innovations, which went against a lot of conventional wisdom, if I hadn't been raised to always be asking questions.

By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.

My wife comes most of the times I teach and stands on the front row to help me. She's been wonderfully supportive.

In the universities, we teach you what we decide you need to know. And the employers find out when they hire people that students didn't learn what we needed them to learn. Online learning offerings, like the University of Phoenix, have relationships with employers and teach what you need to know.

Do not be deceived by impostors.

There are companies trying to build business within Saudi Arabia, and what they find is that if they try to bring on locals and teach them how to become senior executives, they just don't show up to work. They are not predictable as to when they'll come in and how much of their hearts are into that opportunity.

I don't have my finger on the pulse of corruption in China, but I think most people on the ground would say that as China was emerging from communism, it was a very regulated society, and therefore, it was very corrupt. But as they have deregulated the economy, there just aren't as many opportunities for people to be corrupt.

If you develop a product that gets what the customer is trying to get done, you don't have to advertise; people will just pull it into their lives.

If you make that decision, that you'll always follow that rule, then your commitment to do it sinks into your heart, and when you realize the benefits of having integrity time after time, it really changes your heart, not just your head.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet... Ultimately, you become commercially successful.

Businesses that distribute information and news are in the business of training and teaching people.

Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.

Growth makes management easier. In particular, it makes making labor concessions seem easy. It's when growth stops because you're being disrupted that managing becomes really, really hard, and as a result, most disrupted companies simply disappear.

Disruption is continuously afoot in every industry, but especially in autos. It is how Toyota, Nissan and Honda bloodied Detroit: They did not start their attack with Lexus, Infiniti and Acura, but with low-end subcompact models branded Corona, Datsun and CVCC.

When an entrant competitor attacks the low end of any market, the rational reaction of the incumbent firms is to abandon rather than defend it - because the low end is the least profitable of their possible investments.