It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.

I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.