Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day’s work for a writer. You can’t put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.
Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they’re not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they’re for all of us.
We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they’re doing it.
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where “ordinary” life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.