The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.