We're made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel colour, and experience it.

Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.

Bodily discomfort and emotional fear and attachment make the dying uncomfortable and fearful. So, to help those dying people, I think modern medical science has a lot of facilities to reduce pain, or perhaps not to reduce pain, but not to experience pain.

In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.

When you're younger, you're trying to understand and make sense of what your parents are trying to instill in you, which is ultimately life experience. I remember being 17 and my dad trying to teach me the importance of responsibility.

“Do not let yourself become lazy or content. Do not stop trying to improve yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to fail and don’t be afraid of new experiences; because the moment you stop growing and learning is the moment you start dying.”

“He looked at me intently, from what seemed behind the veil of a grave experience. Then slowly and prophetically, he said the scariest thing I'd ever heard: "Because the answer to a heartfelt question, Jack, will always break your heart.”

“Sitting inside the train of Time, we wonder, "Where is it going? What is the purpose of all this?" When we float out of it and experience Timelessness, we realize that there is no coming, no going. Then we come back into the train and start asking the same question.”

“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”

I wanted a CFO with public company experience; I needed an HR department, new office space, and a board which could help me grow the business. Insight, the private equity firm I chose, helped me with all that.