“Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.”

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.

Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.

There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

You drew a bird that was here, a kind of sweet chanticleer. But with a terrible fear that the cage couldn’t tame

Birds are not free since Men have invented cages.

Bird cage is nice only when it is empty!

Those blue eyes that had stopped my heart the first time she looked at me found me in the crowd.” -Cage

You are not called to be a canary in a cage. You are called to be an eagle, and to fly sun to sun, over continents.