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

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.