The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

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