Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of….

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief….

The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly..

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold….

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympat….

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be..

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifes….

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person..

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that….

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forge….

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'ever….

We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host o….

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe..

We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. ... Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to….

We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's th….

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts..

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone..

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack ….

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them r….

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever belie….

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately..