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.

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

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing happy about the woods, I thought, especially at night.

Owain told me about the beautiful, fair-haired Vesta. It took me several minutes to work out that Vesta was a horse, and that Owain was possibly in love with her.

There are moments that aren't great. And I think it's amazing for people to be able to have some insight, to be able to see the support system and what really happens.

A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

There are more myths about Black Wednesday than the Greeks ever created.

If Heaven and Earth are unable to persist, how could man?

When I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides.

To expect an impossibility is madness.

People are not hungry because we dont produce enough. People are hungry for political reasons.

The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]