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

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

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

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. ... Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it." That's what all religions tell us: "Get on your knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." Otherwise our minds are like sieves.

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.