The more comfortable you become at accepting recognition, the more comfortable you will be with giving it.

People often say, 'I don't need recognition,' and the truth is they are right. We don't need it. But like healthy food and exercise, life is a whole lot better with it.

Happy couples resist the temptation to go to bed at different times. They go to bed at the same time, even if one partner wakes up later to do things while their partner sleeps.

If and when they have a disagreement or argument, and if they can't resolve it, happy couples default to trusting and forgiving rather than distrusting and begrudging.

Have you ever heard someone tell a story but felt they are just mouthing the words without being emotionally connected? When you do this, you often create a more negative reaction than if you hadn't told a story at all. That's because others can see that you're just going through the motions.

Customers are your best teachers. Learning about your customer's beliefs, values, and priorities teaches you which selling points you should emphasize.

It's no fun being a salesperson when it feels like you're talking to a wall. That's what it feels like when you haven't learned your customer's points of interest.

Buying involves decision-making. It's a performance activity, like sports or acting.

When you're actually talking over someone, it's as if you're just pontificating and they're not even there. And their body language - they're trying to get away from you. And if you're pontificating at an audience, and there's a break, the non-martyrs in the audience are not going to come back. I mean, they just want to get away from you.

I think people don't want to be persuaded. And people don't even like to do the persuading.

When you're trying to persuade people, more often than not, they feel you're being pushy. When you focus on influencing them, they're much less defensive and open to hearing what you have to say.

People act on what they want more often than what they need.

People really don't like to be inconvenienced. If you don't agree with that, ask yourself how you like it when it happens to you.

If fun puts a smile on your face, beauty and elegance put a smile in your heart and take your breath away. It's longer-lasting and more satisfying than fun.

MIA stands for 'missing in action,' which is the way others can experience you when you're too busy multi-tasking, being pulled at by the world and by everything that's going on in your head, and, essentially, when you're too busy being busy.

Do something to help your community or people around you. That will help you feel more worthwhile and less alone.

Too often, founders make decisions before determining whether they are the right thing to do. These decisions often create chaos in their companies where people are having to jump from the last 'great idea' to yet another unproven-and-about-to-be-poorly-executed one.

In my executive advising role, my persona, which seems to work very well with both women and men, is being 'the big brother you always wanted.' I am fortunate to have two such big brothers, so this isn't just a theoretical construct.

Women have always run the world; maybe it's time to give them a chance at ruling it.

One of the reasons it is so difficult to break a connection to something or someone you have imprinted on is that after you imprint, it seeds into your mind and goes from working memory to stored, hard-wired memory from which it is much more difficult to sever that attachment.

More often than not, CEOs are conflict-avoidant because their role is to define vision and strategy than it is to get into confrontations with negative and toxic people which they can't stand.

Technology loves and thrives and makes gobs of money on conspicuous consumption.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

I really like the idea of being a bit unpredictable. I'm known for being a nice, easy-going person with a straightforward exterior. So I think a bit of me wants to be sort of sly and devious.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.

I'm really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist - a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.

I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.

No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.

Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.

One of the freedoms you get if you earn a lot of money from a book is to throw away what you want. And if you throw a lot away, the good stuff always comes back; nothing is lost.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane.

I am quite amazed how, when people earn lots of money, they think they have to spend it on things that give them access to the club constituted by the people who are in their tax bracket.

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.