There are also many things my wife can't stand about me, and there are certain capacities that she has that are different than mine. The trick is to find compatibilities.

Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.

Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.

It's helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that's quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable.

To me, being able to find gratification in more venues, rather than greater gratification in a few, seems like a much more sane way of living.

Play becomes a distraction, something you don't really need to do. It's not for serious people. They work hard, they don't play hard. Yes, you can say play hard, but that really means, keep working hard, right?

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.