It may be that learning to do creative work of any kind - not just direct imagery exercises - may help combat writer's block.

The best confidence artist makes us feel not as if we're being taken for a ride but as if we are genuinely wonderful human beings who are acting the way wonderful human beings act and getting what we deserve.

Three-card monte is one of the most persistent and effective cons in history. The games still pop up along city streets. But we tend to dismiss the victims as rubes.

One of the things that women really excel at is reading and reacting to subtle cues. We've always had to do that because men don't have to.

Before I found out what poker really was I had this picture in my mind of men smoking cigars and having all these chips and like going all macho and crazy. I don't think there's been that much done in the mainstream community to change that perspective.

I'm capable of just putting my butt in a chair and spending nine hours a day studying poker. I took it as a full time job. So I think that it's a combination of being lucky, but also really studying, working hard and pushing myself to do everything I could.

Erik Seidel ended up introducing me to some of the best players in the world, a few of whom also agreed to take me on to coach me. So I had access to the best poker minds in the world to help me study and figure things out.

I find the game fascinating and poker has unlocked parts of me emotionally. I'm enjoying the process but there are moments when I'm really down. It's a ton of travel, it's exhausting, physically and emotionally. It's lonely.

I've figured out how to turn what's different about me and limitations - I'm new to this world, I'm a woman, I don't have a math background - and how I use that to my advantage. They're what make me unique. In poker you learn very quickly, if you play like everyone else, you'll be fine, but you'll never be great.

And, when it comes to politics, it can be awfully difficult to put your desires aside and to acknowledge that the world is a much messier place, where open-minded people might be conservative and liberals may well be conscientious.

At least in the U.S., the party you believe in plays a big role in how you conceive of yourself. It feels good to think that your party is smarter, and that the smarts are what drive people to your party.

The U.S. has some of the most significant income inequality in the developed world, yet people seem routinely to underestimate that fact.

Our lives don't make sense in abstraction, only when compared with the lives of others.

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

Thinking about time travel may seem like something humans have been doing since the first caveman dropped the first rock on his foot. But, even to begin to imagine the possibility of time travel, your mind must be able to wrap itself around the notion of a past and a future.

We tend to dismiss things we don't particularly like, or that we find disturbing, as aberrations.

Incongruous information is discarded, and supporting information is eagerly retained. Our memory actually ends up skewed: we are better able to process and recall the facts that we are motivated to process and recall, while conveniently forgetting those that we would prefer weren't true.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

If someone in a powerful position acts in a certain way or expresses a certain view, we implicitly assume that those actions and views are associated with power, and that emulating them may be to our advantage.

No one is ever bias-free, but some people let their biases influence their actions more than others.

We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

Humans are the most complicated, nuanced things that exist. We can't be reduced to labels or summed up with five traits - even if they are the Big Five.

The last thing in the world I want to do is write something in memory of Walter Mischel. I still can't quite accept that he's gone. And so I procrastinate, and with every day I don't put pen to paper, I reinforce his life's work with my reluctance.

Finding the one right candidate in a group is hard, and companies don't have much time to figure out exactly which questions can help them tell similar-seeming candidates apart.