“But I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.”

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

I didn’t feel empty. I wished I’d felt empty. … I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.

My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.

The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.

My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

People with nothing to declare carry the most.

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn’t matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It’s almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.

My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self-love is complicated. It is your hardest days as much as your best days that help you grow. All of this is part of being human.

Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self-love is complicated.

Directing is monumentally complicated and it’s a function of all the time you pay to it. I think it would be great to do a movie I’m not in, I could just eat Fritos and just say, ‘yeah, it’s good!’ Some day.

Women are a beautiful complication, and I look forward to far more beauties and far more complications.

Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.

And it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others.