I am always anxious.

Travel is a lot like love.

I am a very aesthetic person.

Not everyone is worth listening to.

Love is something that we need to learn.

My office. It's drab and boring but quiet.

Most good thinking has its origin in fear.

We should not be frightened by appearances.

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

A gray V-neck pullover from Gap. I have 30 of them.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

I was an incredibly lonely, very alienated teenager.

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

I think I have grown impatient with just being a writer.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

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

To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

Atheism is having a heyday in the born-again United States.

What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

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

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.

The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.

The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

I think a certain degree of pessimism is actually helpful to love.

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

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

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Often we think love is a feeling: that you spontaneously experience it.

Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.

I think it is very possible that my deeper character is not very English.

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition.

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

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

When a restaurant is too popular, it starts to harm the reason you are there.

I've tried to write about Heathrow before and been escorted off the premises.

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

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

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