“Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.”

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

“...a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment... because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time.”

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.”

“The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.”

“The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.”

“as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.”