“Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.”

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.

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.

Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

So that isn’t the concern. You have to do what you can do, and share what you feel is appropriate to share in the moment.

I also want [my kids] to always feel confident and free to be themselves.

I’m very open and honest, and I feel like it’s important for women to hear that we’re not perfect; none of us are perfect.

I don’t feel I ever played the victim, although I was always in jeopardy.

There’s nothing wrong with wearing a look over and over again, if it suits you and makes you feel great.

It makes me feel feminine and safe. I don’t like to be hovering over a guy or feel like a linebacker.

There are two kinds of people in this world.

How dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what’s funny, how to build distinctive and original characters.