What are you unwilling to optimise?

I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

It’s easy to try to exaggerate the problems just to get more attention. So for me, it was very clear that the best way to deal with that was to do the best science that I was capable of doing.

I’ve had this concern all the time, but I can only hope that if one writes with appreciation and delicacy and respect, then it’s okay. I have to say that I’ve written a hundred times as much as I’ve published, because if there’s any thought of offense or embarrassment, then I will put the thing quietly away.

They were blocked in their minds to do this because they thought, oh this is not done, we don’t do that in our field and you can’t do that, and I said: Why not?

you have got to be totally honest and give advice and analysis that you’re asked to give that’s based on evidence. And if the analysis that you come to comes to a conclusion that a president might not like to hear that, you can’t be afraid of saying, “Mr. President, with all due respect, this is the way I think the situation is.”