Quotes from Alain de Botton

I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.

I always feel that I am writing for somebody who is bright but impatient. Someone who doesn't have unlimited time. That is my sense of the reader. So I have got to get to the point.

Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.

There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other.

It's easy to forget how little strategic thinking ever gets done in the day. Judging by the ideas generated there, our beds have more of a right to be called our offices than our offices.

Advertising is - quite often - alive to our real needs. It's just the products on offer might not be the things that will help us satisfy them.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

Used to do a lot of falling in love with people, almost in the street, and imagining that there would be no obstacle to a happy love story other than finding the 'right person'.

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.

I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.

Work is a way of bringing order to chaos, and there's a basic satisfaction in seeing that we are able to make something a little more coherent by the end of the day.