The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.

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

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.