Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.