Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.