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What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Within
Narrowly
Story
Constraints
Interest
Plot
Whether
Moves
Moving
Tells
Someone
Defined
Stories
Interests
Fiction

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.
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There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.
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People don't rise from nothing.
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Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.
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We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
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People can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.
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Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.
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It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.
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David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - The Sports Gene - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an all-star challenge on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decat
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We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability-relentl ess effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.
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You may hate Hillary Clinton and you may have good reason for hating Hillary Clinton, but Hillary Clinton is one person who even if she's elected will be gone one day and you still have the task of keeping American democracy going.
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Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.
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The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
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You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.
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If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.
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One of the things I think the police have to do is to stop behaving like armies.
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Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured.
Malcolm Gladwell
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That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
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Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.
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What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.
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