Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.