#427: Michael Lewis on the Crafts of Writing, Friendship, Coaching, Happiness, and More

People waste years of their lives not being willing to waste hours of their lives.

My wife and children make fun of how much I exercise. It's one of those addictions I've encouraged in myself ... It's the closest thing there is to a magic pill. It not only makes me feel better; it makes me think better.

The need to always seem busy or be busy stops people from finding things that are really worth doing.

My father used to tell me that on our family coat of arms there was a motto in Latin, and the motto was, 'Do as little as possible and that unwillingly for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task.'

When someone says something, don't ask if it's true; ask what might it be true of—what value might there be in that thing that was said? Don't try to show me how smart you are by showing how stupid everybody else is; show me how smart you are by showing me how smart everybody else is.

Pessimism is stupid. When you're pessimistic, you live it twice: once when you're worrying about the bad thing happening and the second time when it actually happens.

Anybody who writes books learns that you write a book, but the reader reads a book, and the reader may read a book that's entirely different from what you thought you wrote, and you can't really do much about it.

If I have a problem with anything I'm writing, if I just go for a bike ride or walk up a mountain, the problem is resolved by the end of it—it just resolves itself.

Kids screwed up my natural writing rhythm. My natural rhythm would be to start at 4:00 in the afternoon, write until 3:00 in the morning, and sleep until noon, but you can't do that with kids.