The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.

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.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.