“We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.”

Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.

It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.

The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.

To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.

The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

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

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

Not everyone is worth listening to.

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

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

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

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

There were years when I was a beer and tequila guy, then I got real fat. And then I found that you could actually go on a diet and drink scotch. Then I got hooked on scotch, and if you get hooked on scotch, then everything else just tastes wrong.

We must accept life for what it actually is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

A coach, especially at a college level – much more at a college or high school level, than at a pro level – you’re more of a teacher than an actual coach.

You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It’s just I wouldn’t actually go there looking for the food.

Ive never actually watched another director work.

Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it’s got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It’s not pretty. But it’s striking, I’ll give it that. It’s not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.

Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football.

Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?