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

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

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.

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.