Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us."

"One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy."

"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."

"Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them."

"One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on."

"We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease."

"To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could."

"It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge."

"Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand."

"There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life."

"What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty."

"It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear."

"People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages."

"A good half of the art of living is resilience."

"Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to."

"You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days."

"Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself."

"The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness"."

"The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts."

"Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough."

"The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to."

"Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test."

"Must being in love always mean being in pain?"

"Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are."

"The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well."

"Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason."

"We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think."

"Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from."

"There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough."

"It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things."

"Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope."

"You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them."

"One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?"

"Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards."

"Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice."

"A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me."

"What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery."

"The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else."

"One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass."

"Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition."

"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 or love."

"There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed."

"There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most."

"Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go."

"The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call."

"The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life."

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

"What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others."

"Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent"