We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.