Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

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

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.