Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden.

The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the second world war and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure.

I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.

The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.

Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.

Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: "Time is money." He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn't money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life.

We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.