Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

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.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.