“Practice kindness - particularly when you feel irritated or things are not going well. Kindness hardly ever goes wrong.”

“Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too.”

“Don't for once ever think that what you're doing is easy. If it feels that way, you're probably doing something wrong. Throwing words onto a page is easy. But writing, the real kind, is hard. It's damn hard.”

“Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of "identity". It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.”

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”

“Self-belief, also called self-efficacy, is the kind of feeling you have when you have, like a Jedi, mastered a particular kind of skill and with its help have been able to achieve your set goals.”