I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

I saw all of the films [based on The Tempest] available, including the one with Helen Mirren in which Prospero is Prospera - you wonder, "Would it work?" But it does, because anything she does works.

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.