People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

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.

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.

An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.