Malcolm Gladwell outside his home in New York. Photograph: Annie Collinge

This much I know: Malcolm Gladwell

I've nearly died several times

The writer, 46, on espionage, the financial meltdown, and crying over Dickens

Tim Adams
Sunday 2 May 2010 00.35 BST

We need more generalists. Generalists outperform specialists in many tasks.

I'm only snobbish about running. Competitive runners disdain listening to music when they run; I want to at least give the impression I am listening only to my body.

I can't spend too long on the internet. I run out of things to look up really quickly.

I've nearly died several times. I hit a car flat out on a bicycle and flew 25ft through the air and was unscathed. I had to be dragged from frozen rapids by my dad as a child. I'm not at nine lives, but I'm close.

I see storytelling like a puzzle: you arrange details for people until you get them in just the right order.

The urge to predict, and the payoffs for pretending to be able to do so, are large. But no one ever knows for sure what will happen next.

We all used to listen to a preacher every Sunday; the human need for that kind of storytelling does not go away. It's up to writers and journalists to fill the gap.

History suggests that there is almost exactly a 50% chance that any piece of information a spy gives you is true. We would be as well off getting rid of the secret service and flipping coins.

At the root of the financial meltdown was a profound kind of laziness. These people just weren't doing their jobs – 95% of them called it wrong.

I prefer great songwriters to politicians. I am drawn to minor genius.

My father, the most proper of Englishmen, from Sevenoaks, would cry reading Dickens to us as kids. Those are the passages I remember.

I have idea block. I go through weeks where I think there is nothing new.

Hollywood is strangely indifferent to questions of faith, while the rest of America is consumed by them.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

THE GUARDIAN