He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.

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

No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.