Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.

From paying off friends' tax bills to rescuing stray dogs and stuffing £20 notes into the hands of homeless people, I can't get rid of my money fast enough.

People willy-nilly borrow for consumption. Civil servants willy-nilly borrow for consumption and then wonder why they don't have enough money at the end of the month.

'Simplifying' the tax code is a priority mainly for people who make enough money to want to avoid paying taxes, and who make their money by means unorthodox enough to make avoiding taxes possible and desirable.

When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.

The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.

I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.

I know how to create and make people feel something. Honestly, if I didn't do this, I would just have some minimum-wage job in New Mexico, and I would go out on the weekends and make just enough money to pay my insurance and pay for a couple beers, and that would be it.

Our societies have achieved a general level of prosperity of which most of all the human beings who have ever lived could only dream. Now we need to show that we can stop continually wanting more - more money, more stuff. We must show that it is possible for people to realise that they have enough.

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