As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored.

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.