“You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.”

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

The first matter that the slave will be brought to account for on the Day of Judgment is the prayer.

Anyone who’s had a shower and hasn’t ingested illegal narcotics within a couple of days stands out on a bench in the courthouse.

Don’t I yearn for the days when a draw across the throat made f**king resolution.

As a wise man once said, “April Fools Day is for amateurs. You NEVER need an excuse to mess with people’s heads.”

So that was a joke that I continue up to this very day.

We start to realize that there are anodynes in life that help us through the day.

I would come home and she would tell me about her life that day and all her problems and I remember saying to her, look, you really got me through this picture because I would shed everything when I came home.

You grow up real quick, a half-Mexican in a sailor’s suit, because I’d be riding the streetcar to school everyday.