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

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

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.

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.

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

A number I'd love to know: the % of those now saying 'we have to vote Obama to stop an attack on Iran' who will support one if Obama does it.

People always think that if you eat anything as a model, it's amazing. I used to tease them and say, you know I'm going to throw up afterwards.

When you don't know where you're at, you don't get upset you're not somewhere else.

Life is hard enough as it is without choosing someone difficult to share it with.

The senses, being the explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge.

I don't want to wait more than a year and a half or two years between books.

The time has come to accept in our hearts and minds that with freedom comes responsibility.

When we went in the late 1990s, Nigeria was still in a dictatorship. So we didn't go with a mission. It started really with a sort of blankness and open-endedness.

Just because we go through a difficult situation, it doesn’t mean that the future is predetermined. The future is very much in our hands, in our actions.