Approaching Entropy

And though it is of the others, of relationships, that I write, the heart of my life has been my being alone.

Humans crave connection — even negative connections.

I ask music all the same questions: is it big enough? Is it beautiful enough? Is it sad enough? Is it finished?

There's no absolute meaning to songs. There's no absolute meaning to art. It's like the way that you can re-read a book. I have a few books — Birdsong, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Atonement, The Collector and a couple of others – that I re-read every couple years. I know every word of each of these books, but they always feel different to me, because you're seeing them through a new phase of your life.

If it is miracles you are after, you must know how to wait.

To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man's welfare and nothing at all to its bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Emphasise uncertainty, expert disagreement and doubt and you will find a willing audience. If nobody really knows the truth, then people can believe whatever they want.

All my work is an attempt to find that balance, preserving the brutality and the tenderness both. It is important to be clear-eyed about brutality.

In these turbulent and challenging times, we might wish that the world were other than it is—but I find it more helpful to focus on how we choose to respond to it. What values and virtues do we need to cultivate in order to best participate in whatever the world will bring us next?

"I'm a cultured sort of person and read all kinds of remarkable books, but I just can't get a line on what it is I'm really after. Shall I go on living or shall I shoot myself, I mean? But anyway, I always carry a revolver."

I look at you all and I think, you fools: you talk about a one-way trip to Mars like it’s something that you may or may not do, but don’t you realise — you’re already on a one-way trip to Mars.

"If we can’t be whistleblowers like Li Wenliang, then let us become those who will hear the whistle."

A superyacht owned by hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb and named after the Buddhist term for enlightenment has become the focus of an investigation in Belize after it was filmed damaging part of the country’s precious barrier reef.

Film can hold more silence than television.

"[Virtue-signalling] is instead the insult of choice for people who don’t want to have to engage with the issue itself. In truth, what the critic dislikes is rarely the signalling; it is the virtue."

And isn't life a swindle?