Don’t take yourself seriously, but do take your work seriously. Do what you say you’re going to do. If you don’t, you’ll lose respect for yourself. And if you don’t respect yourself, you’ll find it effortless to trespass across your own boundaries and violate all that you value.

Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us... See more