I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It’s always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
It’s very hard to respect people on holiday – everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity – but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it’s a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can’t believe in any of it.
I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
I know a lot about writing, but I don’t know much about how other industries work. I’ve tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
I’m also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage – which no previous society has ever believed.
What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.