I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.