“Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.”

When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

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.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.

I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but look: Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by sixty-five million years of evolution have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?

I love facts and figures. It’s like following a detective story, piecing together what’s going on in the economy.

All of it! – was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn’t see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

Many people, improperly, lump together libertarians and the Tea Parties.

And we have to work together to secure the continent in order to keep dangerous people and dangerous things out and strengthen perimeter security on a continental basis.

Many different tastes share the plate, but none of them lose their individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely ‘local’ cuisine.

When does she do all this thinking? We’re together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We’ve been married 48 years.

People who laugh together generally don’t kill each other.