“Ninety percent of the population spends time imagining their future and forgetting that now is where we live and breathe. The ten percent who live in the present are the ones who have the stories to tell, the ones who live life the way it's meant to be lived.”

“Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?”

“Ninety-five percent of people who walk the earth are simply inert. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are people who do what they say they can do.”

“Persistence isn't very glamorous. If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent. We love its flash and dazzle. But great power lies in the other ninety-nine percent.”

“We know how ninety-nine percent of the universe works," he told Carter shortly after they met, "and that's the clockworks, that's what we build with. But the other one percent makes the clockworks wind down. That's inertia. No one knows how that works, but it does. It's that one percent mystery that's the way of our maker. Put everything together, energy and inertia, the explicable and the inexplicable, and that's how you and I make our living.”

“It's hard, to live in the present. Right this minute. We spend most of our time in the past. Or in the future…about half in each. But to live in the present! Hardly anybody can do it.”