Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.

The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

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.