Zitat des Tages von Alain de Botton:
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition.
Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days.
I believe that art is a tool and that, like all tools, it has functions. I also think it is important to know what the tool is for so that we can better know how and when to use it.
If you're understood in maybe, I don't know, 60% of your soul by your partner, that's fantastic. Don't expect that it's going to be 100%. Of course you will be lonely.
Everyone's more vulnerable than they seem, and I think men are more vulnerable. Once you get close to a man, the whole thing's a facade anyway. I think manhood is fragile.
The problem with airports is that we go there when we need to catch a plane - and because it's so difficult to find the way to the gate, we tend not to look around at our surroundings.
My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.
Love is something that we need to learn.
Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
My office. It's drab and boring but quiet.
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 believed.
When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.
On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.
What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.
What I do know from my life is the phenomenon of saying, 'This is too small a thing to argue about', but then nevertheless finding oneself in that argument.
The solution as consumers is - perhaps surprisingly - to take adverts very, very seriously. We should ask ourselves what it is that we find lovely in them - the visions of friendship, togetherness, repose, or whatever. And then consider what would actually help us find these qualities in our lives.
I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.
I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
We have to put aside the customary historical reading of works of art in order to invite art to respond to certain quite specific pains and dilemmas of our psyches.
Some of the reason why we marry the wrong people is that we don't really understand ourselves.
There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
One of the most welcome aspects of office work is that you do not need to be fully yourself.
We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
I am a very aesthetic person.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.