Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don't support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck.

Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur: an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

Honesty is the fastest way to prevent a mistake from turning into a failure.

I swear on everything holy I do not know what's on the Internet about me.

The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.

Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving.

Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.

It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is, to some degree, an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge.

It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement.

Love is a brainworm.

Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic.

Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair.

A book isn't noise to drown out other noise.

When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy.

I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further.

Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it.

Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.

This is now the way our culture prioritises. Look up 'Steppenwolf,' and you'll get the band before the novel. Look up Jesus Christ, and you'll get the musical. Look up Princess Link-a-din and you'll get LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network.

There's a lot to be said for misanthropy.

There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month - I've no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when - fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order - well in order, I presume - to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning.

The queue and the fan are, of course, closely related in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read, wear, or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion.

Of the secular mysteries to which I wake with fresh and sometimes angry amazement every day, the queue is the second-most baffling. The first is the fan.

I like a singalong. And I'm a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself.

Maybe we'd forgotten what socialists are meant to look and sound like. Well, now we've been reminded. They're meant to look and sound like Jeremy Corbyn.