Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

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.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.