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.

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

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.