“I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.”

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.

When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

I’m actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.

Conforming is not cool. Embracing who you are and what makes you different is actually what’s really cool.

There are many upsides to being the studio executive, but one of the downsides is that you get removed from the actual process of making the movie.

I get to play out all kinds of bad behavior without anyone actually coming to harm.

That’s why I like to work with the photogram, because the contact with what is represented is actual.

I take pride in my music, I feel like it actually does something for people personally, in their personal lives, so it’s real music and it helps people get through things like I was able to get through things.

An actual right is something that governments need merely to secure, not to implement.

That’s actually a massive step away from his original position, and he’s taking a lot of heat in his world just for being my friend, just for hanging around with me.