English - Writer | December 20, 1969 -
Everyone's more vulnerable than they seem, and I think men are more vulnerable. Once you get close to a man, the whole thing's a facade anyway. I think manhood is fragile.
Alain de Botton
MenManThinkYouMoreFragile
The number one person who needs my books is me. I'm not some sort of disinterested guru who has worked life out and is handing things out to the poor people who might not have life worked out.
LifePeopleMePersonPoorOut
What I do know from my life is the phenomenon of saying, 'This is too small a thing to argue about', but then nevertheless finding oneself in that argument.
LifeSmallSayingMy LifeFinding
The greatest compliment I get about my writing is when people say, 'How did you know so much about me?' And of course, the answer is very simple: 'I just observed myself without sentimentality.'
MyselfSimplePeopleMeWritingYou
I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.
WisdomArtI AmSomeonePhilosophy
Parent and child may both love, but - unbeknown to the child - each party is on a different end of the axis. This is why, in adulthood, when we first long for 'love', what we mean is that we want to 'be loved' as we were once loved by a parent.
LoveChildEndParentLovedLong
I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA - and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.
LifeLoveFireMoonSocietyNASA
I've tried to write about Heathrow before and been escorted off the premises.
WriteOffBeenTriedBeforeAbout
Trying to be a sort of intellectual in the public arena is very irritating to people. They think, 'Why is this bugger on television?'
PeopleThinkTryingTelevisionWhy
It's great to get an 'F', but you also want to give the sense that there's something outside achievement. I've seen a lot of so-called high-achievers who don't feel they've achieved much.
GreatAchievementFeelYouWantGet
I guess my overall life plan is to think about issues that concern me and try to use culture generally to make sense of them. I'm more worried that I'm going to die before I've had time.
LifeTimeCultureMeThinkPlan
What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.
LifeMeNo SenseIncompleteSense
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