We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.