English - Writer | December 20, 1969 -
It's almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in high demand in society. What a gift to do that, as opposed to other people who would say, 'I want to be a novelist but actually I have to be an accountant.'
Alain de Botton
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The central task for a business is to make a profit. The challenge is to make a profit by doing things which are genuinely good for people and good for societies.
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The idea of a book that can make a change to your life, that can affect your perspective, is a beautiful and great ambition: one that Seneca, Nietzsche and Tolstoy would have sympathised with.
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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.
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We don't sulk with everybody. We limit our sulks to a very particular person: the person who's supposed to love us and understand us. And we make this equation that if you love me, you're supposed to understand me even if I don't explain what's wrong.
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Most of the time, we make discoveries about how difficult people are at the moment when the difficulties have actually hurt us; therefore, we are not likely to be forgiving or sympathetic.
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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.
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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.
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I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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