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

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?

The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.