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

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.