The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I’ve sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance...

Call it not patience, Gaunt; it is despair:

It’s when the ‘international community’ expresses ‘concern’ about your ‘situation’ that your situation is well and truly fucked.

You don’t need to sit on a throne before you have the chance to dream; you don’t have to feel fat meat in-between your molars to become a strategic dreamer. You can be a dreamer...

The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.

But the only way never to do the wrong thing is never to do anything.

How can you follow your heart, unless you know why you have allowed it to be empty for so long and didn’t have the courage to fix it?

Not doing anything can be worse than doing the wrong thing.

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There’s a certain boldness to inaction.

Great goals are never scored by not kicking the ball

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live...