The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.

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

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