The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

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