“As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.”

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.

I don’t like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don’t really understand the word ‘irony’ too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it’s much more exalted.

I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That’s why I love coffee shops and public places – I mean, they’re all out there.

I had become aware, as early as my college days, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible can be imagined, that has not been held by one of the philosophers.

The idea of only someone else loving you is absurd. You need to learn to love yourself too.

What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficent for anything else but domestic concerns!

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree