"To my own demise, I rarely ask why I’m hungry because I’m focusing all of my energies on getting fed. And if I persist in such a diminishing cycle, in all probability I will eventually starve to death because I have chosen to gorge myself on the very things that will keep me empty."

"From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters."

"I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting."

"Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey that does your evil bidding. Pullman is a genius just for this."

"When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our own home we're experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present."

"I've always been a bit of a space geek. I wrote an article years ago about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is this biblically sized pool where they train astronauts. And it was just the coolest thing."

"Old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him -- or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say."