as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

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

Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

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