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

“He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.”

“Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.”

“Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.”

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

“Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.”

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