The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.

True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

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