There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.