Nice people often try to contact me for permission to use my games. It is appreciated but please don't bother. These games are yours to do whatever you want to do to them. Feel free to download, modify, mangle them to bits. I won't mind. And if you don't want to give me credit, that's absolutely fine too.

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

“Monopoly. Everybody had it. Nobody liked it…and it’s simple why. Here’s what everyone here has been like at one point during a game of Monopoly: BAM Fuck this game! It’s four in the morning Grandma, YOU WIN!
I’m sitting on Baltic with crap! I’m paying luxury tax out the ass! Oh, and where’d you get the pink fifties? I hate it when you’re the banker Grandma. Don’t touch me Grandpa, ‘Nana’s a cheating whoooore!”

Writing is an art - a window into the deep minds of people. It’s mysterious; it’s a secret, but it’s known; and everyone has their own thoughts waiting to be discovered. The pen is not the tool - it is the mind.

Feel the words swimming through your head; feel them tickling your tongue; swirling; waiting to be told. Then grab a pen, and open your mind. Let your mind take you into worlds you knew but couldn’t remember, let you senses guide your hand, your words, each letter. Close your eyes. Think. Write.

Writing is clear and complex, it’s easy and it’s hard, it’s hatred and it’s love. Writing is not an art. Writing is a feeling and a thought and the ability to share.

His eyes…

So dull, so desperate, so lonely. They looked like the life had been scratched out - ripped off. And he looked tired; so very tired. I looked closer and I thought I caught a glimpse of hope, or love, or happiness; but at once it was gone, swallowed in his sea of sorrow. I knew they had loved once, they had lived once, they had felt once. What could do this? What could drain all the tears from such young eyes? What could makes scars incapable of healing? What memories lay imbedded behind those clouded orbs?

His cracked lips were silent but he said more to me than anyone had ever done. His eyes spoke for the both of us - he had survived the war; he had died during it.

His breath: so close to me, like a whisper of satin; a secret; mine. My eyes are closed but I know he is there - I know soon I will feel the softness of his lips touching mine. Soon I will feel his fingers tracing down my body, stroking me, soothing me. His touch; soft, and delicate; sure, and strong.

I narrowly open my eyes, just stealing a glimpse, but that's all I need. His eyes - so deep, never-ending. They tell of his passion, his fire, his lust. And it's just us …

Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers.

She wasn't coming back. She would only deign to see her husband under conditions that amounted to a slap in the face. He didn't complain. He visited as often as she would allow: twice a week, then once. Then every two. Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.

The problem is that there is no need for the decision markets. The executives and politicians like to make decisions themselves. With all due respect to my readers, I’ll have a graphic metaphor. Trying to sell the concept of decision markets to executives and politicians is like trying to sell very sophisticated, mechanized, high-performance dildos to young men; there is no need for that in the market. For some mysterious reason, the young men insist on performing “that”… using their own instrument.

Opera survives, but it is a tiny sliver of a much bigger, looser music market. The future composts the past: old operas get mounted for living anachronisms; Andrew Lloyd Webber picks up the rest of the business.

The great composer Arnold Schoenberg once wrote of Nyiregyházi, in a note to Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Otto Klemperer, “Such power of expression I have never heard before. … Technique: it is astonishing what and how he plays: one never has the sense that it is difficult, that it is technique at all, but rather that sheer force of will permits him to surmount all difficulties in realizing an idea. — You see I'm becoming almost poetic.”

Robert wept silently, angry with himself because he knew that half his wretchedness was just self-pity, exploiting his grief as a disguise.

The role that so-called quants play in the financial world is analogous to the role batfish play in keeping coral reefs tidy. Just as batfish do not construct the reef but are essential to its health, quants do not create the structure financial markets depend on but do preserve the conditions that make markets function.

One consequence of the growth of microelectronics has been an exploration of the periodic table reminiscent of European navigators' search for the spice islands half a millennium ago. Then, as now, the objective was material of great rarity and value, which was needed in only small quantities but which did jobs that nothing else could manage. In the case of spices, such as nutmeg, cloves and mace, this job was to enhance the taste of food and demonstrate wealth and sophistication. They were so valuable that wars were fought to control their supply in some cases.

In the case of indium, gallium and tantalum it is their unique electrical properties that are of interest. Indium-tin oxide, for example, is both transparent and electrically conductive. Without it, liquid-crystal display screens would be much harder to make. Meanwhile tantalum (used as an insulator in mobile-phone chips) once became so valuable that it, too, helped drive a war—the civil war in eastern Congo, where its ore has been dusted over the countryside like icing sugar by ancient volcanic eruptions.

Finally, a voiceover that doesn't make us want to scream. As our unseen overseer, Kristen Bell's purr is the sexiest disembodied fun you can have without paying $4.95 per minute.

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening… All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.

Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly large mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.

Clocks are ads for time.

L’horologe fait de la réclame pour le temps.

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

Unscrupulous journalists looking for sensational headlines sometimes target cryonics by focusing on specific procedures, such as neuropreservation, and spinning them into lurid tales of wrongdoing. In one recent example, two small openings routinely made in the cranium for monitoring purposes using standard neurosurgical techniques became the story, “Head drilled full of holes!” The same kind of yellow journalism would describe a traditional funeral with the headline: “Funeral Home Scandal: Bodies injected with poison, organs mutilated, remains stuffed into wood boxes and covered with dirt!” Needless to say, this is the worst kind of tabloid journalism. It is both unfair and profoundly disrespectful to patients and their families.

Already I regret listing all of these names. You now have little tic-tac-toe designs on your eyeballs. “Syriana” is exciting, fascinating, absorbing, diabolical and really quite brilliant, but I'm afraid it inspires reviews that are not helpful. The more you describe it, the more you miss the point. It is not a linear progression from problem to solution. It is all problem. The audience enjoys the process, not the progress. We're like athletes who get so wrapped up in the game we forget about the score.

Thomas Bihl, winner of a recent HORSE tournament, in which players have to show mastery of five different styles of poker, thinks the game has more in common with finance than it does with basic forms of gambling, because it requires the constant pricing and repricing of risk. Mr Bihl, a former stock trader, says the move from his old job into poker was a natural progression. Though his Ł71,000 win was “a huge lift”, he says that he is motivated not by money but by the chance to use his brain to outfox opponents. This is a common refrain among regular players. As Ms Coren put it in a recent article: “Cash is nothing more than chips, just the tools of the trade, like fishing rods to an angler. The game is all about money, and nothing to do with money.”

The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

We may disagree on recordings [of The Goldberg Variations] — Gould's 1981 has burned into my brain; listening to anything else is like wearing shoes a half-size off

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic.

Shit is the tofu of cursing.

…wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

The hardest thing is to surround it, to fix its limit where it fades into the penumbra along its edge. To choose it from among the others, to separate it from the light that all shadows secretly, dangerously, breathe.

To begin to dress it casually, not moving too much, not frightening or dissolving it: this is the initial operation where nothingness lies in every move. The inner garments, the transparent corset, the stockings that compose a silky ascent up the thighs.

To all these it will consent in momentary ignorance, as if imagining it is playing with another shadow, but suddenly it will become troubled, when the skirt girds its waist and it feels the fingers that button the blouse between its breasts, brushing the neck that rises to disappear in dark flowing water. It will repulse the gesture that seems to crown it with a long blonde wig (that trembling halo around a nonexistent face!

And you must work quickly to draw its mouth with cigarette embers, slip on the rings and bracelets that define its hands, as it indecisively resists, its newborn lips murmuring the immemorial lament of one awakening to the world. It will need eyes, which must be made from tears, the shadow completing itself to better resist and negate itself.

Hopeless excitement when the same impulse that dressed it, the same thirst that saw it take shape from confused space, to envelop it in a thicket of caresses, begins to undress it, to discover for the first time the shape it vainly strives to conceal with hands and supplications, slowly yielding, to fall with a flash of rings that fills the night with glittering fireflies.

Finally, I want to say that before I came to speak here I was told that the principle of TED Global is that a good speech should be like a mini-skirt: it should be short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the subject. I hope I have achieved that.