“To accomplish the extraordinary, you must seek extraordinary people.”

The vast mass of routinely rational human behavior doesn’t make good novels, but it is just such humdrum rational narrative that provides the background pattern that permits us to make sense, retrospectively, of the intriguing vagaries we encounter, and to anticipate the complications that will arise when the trains of events they put in motion col

Musician and innovator Brian Eno answers his own question—“What is cultural value and how does that come about?”—in “A Big Theory of Culture” (1997).

New cultural thinking isn’t like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It’s the act of conferring that makes things valuable.

Culture is a way of getting people to that point of understanding. The work of a lot of modern culture is to say to people: You’re making value.

people are cultural beings. They can’t help themselves.

it’s the transaction between you and it, and this context, which creates the value.

Between randomness and routine lie the good stories, whose

A benefit by itself is not explanatory; a benefit in a vacuum is indeed a sort of mystery. Until it can be shown how the benefit actually redounds to enhance the replicative power of a replicator, it just sits there, alluring, perhaps, but incapable of explaining anything.