“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.”

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.

My spiritual life is… sometimes I have access to it and sometimes I don’t. When I do have access to it, it’s usually a sense of my understanding what the best course of action or the best thing for me to do.

Anyone with an Internet connection and a few dollars can obtain personal information they should never have access to, including a user’s date of birth, e-mail address, or estimated income.

In my experience, in the real-estate business past success stories are generally not applicable to new situations.

The 2.5 billion adults [around the world] without access to financial services are disproportionately women and young people.

What is important is that we actively express our thoughts and wishes, in every realm that we can access.

Because of social media, we have access to amazing spiritual teachers.

In some of the darkest and hardest moments, there is always a part of me that is okay. And I can always access that part of me.

I get the impression from some people that unless they get direct access to characters’ thoughts and realizations.