In the words of one Buddhist sutra I love to the point of having quoted it twice already in my books: ‘A man who judges himself superior, inferior or even equal to another does not understand reality.’

‘martha argerich heroic polonaise’,

There’s a sentence by Schopenhauer that makes me laugh a lot: ‘The best way to think smart things is not to think twaddle.’

The misery we’ve all experienced when, sitting on the crapper in the cold, yellow light of a sleepless night, we think about the noble image we desperately try to convey to others, and the horrible truth of what really dwells within us, in the secrecy of our hearts and our crappers. Fear, shame and hatred: the grand trinity. That’s something we all

‘If you’d known, what would it have changed?’

My friend Ruth Zylberman sent me these two short letters from an eight-year-old boy to his grandmother during the 1936 purges in the Soviet Union. The first: Dear Babushka, I’m not dead yet. You’re the only one I have in the world and I’m the only one you have. If I don’t die, when I’m grown up and you’re very, very old, I’ll work and take care of

‘You’re not being asked to believe anything. Absolutely not. ‘Don’t believe: try. Take the plunge.

when push comes to shove my favourite sentence is still Captain Haddock’s memorable line, the one I thought about a while ago, and which I think about quite often in fact: ‘It’s both very simple and very complicated.’

Any situation, any state of the world or the mind is a combination of yin and yang: a changing, transitory combination that’s always evolving towards another combination. A yin force is destined to become a yang force, and vice versa, like night becomes day and day becomes night. The day tends towards dusk, the night towards dawn, yin is yang in