Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.

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

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

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

Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.

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.

The number one person who needs my books is me. I'm not some sort of disinterested guru who has worked life out and is handing things out to the poor people who might not have life worked out.

I think of myself as quite a shy person. But when I'm curious about something, I'll go quite far to satisfy my curiosity.

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

I believe that art is a tool and that, like all tools, it has functions. I also think it is important to know what the tool is for so that we can better know how and when to use it.

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.

The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

Artworks are especially good at helping our psyches in a variety of ways: they rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in calm, stretch our sympathies, reignite our senses, and reawaken appreciation.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

A lack of love:
between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself.

We would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.