Writer

The greatest compliment I get about my writing is when people say, 'How did you know so much about me?' And of course, the answer is very simple: 'I just observed myself without sentimentality.'

I think of myself as quite a shy person. But when I'm curious about something, I'll go quite far to satisfy my curiosity.

What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

We must study love the way we study anything else that matters.

I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.

Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to live with?' People who are single. And the ones who say, 'Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty easy to live with; it's just a question of finding the right person,' massive alarm bell rings in my mind.

I think a certain degree of pessimism is actually helpful to love.

Fantasies can be great, but we shouldn't make the wedding a fantasy, because the wedding is the gateway to married life. It shouldn't be a moment of illusion; it should be a moment of preparation.

I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.

If you're understood in maybe, I don't know, 60% of your soul by your partner, that's fantastic. Don't expect that it's going to be 100%. Of course you will be lonely.

There is militaristic-hegemonic-plutocratic side of the U.S. which is getting out of hand and threatens to corrupt the whole republic. I remain a deeply concerned, committed admirer, but also a very worried one.

Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.

I think it is very possible that my deeper character is not very English.

Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling us potted plants and pizzas while the thinkers are a little bit unworldly. Religions both think and do.

My office. It's drab and boring but quiet.

Katie Price is no exception. She, too, is - in a distinctive way - a philosopher. Partially, Katie Price's philosophy is one of extraordinary confidence. She is remarkable not for her looks or antics but because of her tremendous self-assurance and her unwillingness to be intimidated by criticism or failure.

Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.

I am always anxious.