I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you're glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

I'm going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.

Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.

It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.

I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there's a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.

I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!

In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It's very expensive.

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

Money has always been in politics. And I'm not sure you'd want money to be completely out of politics.

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

Countries which receive aid do graduate. Within a generation, Korea went from being a big recipient to being a big aid donor. China used to get quite a bit of aid; now it's aid-neutral.