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

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

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

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.