The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.

The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

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

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

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