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.
The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.