Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.

Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.