The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

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

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.

It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.