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

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

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

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.