One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

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.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

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.