englishloveideauniversityawaycapitalistvaluespeopledonimmediatelypaylikemonasterybeautifulrefugedestroyeddogmawhat
I love the idea of a university as away from capitalist values, where people can do things that don't immediately have to pay their way. It's like a monastery in a way, and that beautiful refuge has been destroyed by dogma about what this stuff is for.
In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.
Virtue is its own reward. We only invented concepts like heaven and hell to describe how we feel. We don't feel good doing bad and it's nice to help someone.
When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another, out in the world. It varies, and I like that.
When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.
I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.