There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.