The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, "Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?"

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

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