Our ideas of happiness, gratification, contentment, satisfaction, all demand that those feelings come from within us. If you flip that on its head and say "What if I took the world at face value?" and then ask "What can I do with what is given?" it's an interesting trick to turn around the whole problem of how you feel.

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

I think the most important thing to realize about play is that it's this thing that's in stuff, it's not in you.

When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.

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?

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.

You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.