Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage.
You know that feeling when you first arrive in a new city? However tired you are, however shattered by the flight, you are impatient to get out and sample the streets, the life, the action.
I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.
If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they’ll forget all the bad stuff
There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.
He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing. But he was, of course, the captain, which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself.
The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do.
It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having met someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.
I’m incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. I’ve always been like that.
I am still moved by passages of Marx: the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,’ for example, where, after the famous line about religion being ‘the opium of the people,’ he goes on to call it ‘the heart of a heartless world.’
The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.
It doesn’t require much thought for one to realise that any travel book worthy of the name has to be a departure from the standard idea of the form.