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.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.

Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

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.

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