“If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.”

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.

It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.

Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.

I grew up with nothing, so whenever I got to where I could have something I felt like I needed to have everything I couldn’t have when I was young.

Reagan didn’t put anything off the table, if he felt it was for the good of the American people to tweak the tax system.

I’m much more a European Italian than I am an American Italian, and I’ve always felt that that style of acting comedy is in me.

…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

It is not hard to feel like an outsider. I think we have all felt like that at one time or another.

That’s where humour lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that’s what I like. I’ve always felt that’s what I would like to do.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful – my personal life suffers.