Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.