Often we think love is a feeling: that you spontaneously experience it.
From Alain de Botton
If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days.
There's something called religion, and it was invented a long time ago by people who felt very out of control with their lives, who didn't know... why the sun always rose over the mountains.
I tell my children what I think myself: That religion is not necessarily convincing, but it is still interesting and not to be laughed at or denigrated.
I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.
The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'
My theory is that many of the things that move us are things we long for but find hard to do.
Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere - and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity and weakness and fear and anxiety because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
Some of the reason why we marry the wrong people is that we don't really understand ourselves.
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.
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