“What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.”

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.

After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

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.

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

Hitler had a plausible case to argue when he claimed that the Anschluss was only the application of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination.

Never do I argue with a man with a desire to hear him say what is wrong, or to expose him and win victory over him.

In the world of comedy, there’s this: “If it’s going badly, get off. If it’s going well, get off”. You can’t argue with that either.

If you’re rational and logical, they argue their case rationally and logically. If you’re loyal and faithful, they turn those against you.

For when the horse and ass begin to think and argue, adieu to riding and driving.

You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

Experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their “pursuit of happiness” to outright obliterating it.

There’s a bunch of songs that I call B-sides on the record that you could argue could maybe have some potential commercial success with another artist, but for me, they just felt really whack.