In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.