“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.”

We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.

Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.

The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.

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.