Altruism raises your mood because it raises your self-esteem, which increases happiness. Plus, giving to others gets you outside of yourself and distracts you from your problems.

A soulmate is someone who you could spend a great deal of time with just sitting on a sofa and feel happy. You don't need fanfare. You don't need to go out to expensive restaurants.

Dumped? Fired? Scorned? Humiliated? Totally pissed off? If so, I've got great news! You might be on your way to living your best life ever - if you consciously choose to channel this pain into fuel - and use it to motivate yourself to become your highest potential self!

I'm a big believer that your life is basically a sum of all the choices you make. The better your choices, the better opportunity to lead a happy life.

In Hinduism, Shiva is a deity who represents transformation. Through destruction and restoration, Shiva reminds us that endings are beginnings, and that our world is constantly undergoing a cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

The grass is always greener on the other side - until you get there and see it's AstroTurf. Symbols are never reality. Someone might have amassed material success and fame, but that doesn't mean they're happy. So, don't go judging a person's life by the cover.

Do activities you're passionate about - which make your heart and soul feel perky - including things like working out, cooking, painting, writing, yoga, hiking, walking, swimming, being in nature, being around art, or reading inspiring books.

Choose to focus your time, energy and conversation around people who inspire you, support you and help you to grow you into your happiest, strongest, wisest self.

The best things in life are often waiting for you at the exit ramp of your comfort zone.

You're not looking for perfection in your partner. Perfection is all about the ego. With soulmate love, you know that true love is what happens when disappointment sets in - and you're willing to deal maturely with these disappointments.

The point about 'state-of-the-nation' novels is not that they should be about the 'state-of-the-nation', but they should be about people.

If I had been brought up in America, I think I would still have had the same sort of job as a writer.

There's this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can't dabble in art - it's a life. Being a writer, an artist... is a whole life.

When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 88, she was the oldest person ever to receive the prize and one of only 11 female winners in its history. Her award was the end of a very long journey from a remote farm in Rhodesia to a banquet at Stockholm's Stadshus, the grand city hall in Stockholm.

I was lucky to get to Oxford. I am now an honorary fellow of my old college, which is nice, particularly for a colonial like me.

This Oscar Pistorius business is interesting. There is this cult of carrying lots of guns and being ready to shoot somebody. There were people I knew had guns and carried them openly around Johannesburg. It is frowned on now to carry a gun, but Pistorius and co. got away with it.

The working-class Africans are not doing very well, and one of the problems is their education is so shocking. It is routinely said it is a result of apartheid. Deliberately, black people were not allowed to know too much. They could read and write a bit to be useful, but that's about it.

I suppose on the filmmaking side, you can learn how to cram a lot into a small space. But I think that advertising, even on what is called the creative side, is incredibly easy if you have that kind of mind. A lot of people regard it as Machiavellian and dangerous, but, in fact, it is morally neutral.

If I was at home, I'd find myself checking email and looking at the Internet when I should be working. In the library, I can get an awful lot done in a couple of hours, but it can become quite sociable, which you have to watch out for. There are a lot of people you can pop out and have a coffee with.

I thought that, post-apartheid, there would be absolutely no interest in South Africa. That has been both true and untrue. The major writers like Gordimer and Coetzee have produced major books. But some of the more minor writers have drifted away.

Winning the Whitbread was a very major thing for me. I'd always been well reviewed, but this made me widely read.

It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea.

It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life.

For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.