Compare and despair. Comparing yourself with someone else or what someone else is doing or what someone else has is a recipe for sadness. What matters is who you are and what you want.

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

All our tombs will be unvisited in a few years - all our actions will mostly be unremembered - but the smile you gave the checkout lady or the kind words you gave to a stranger in the street could still be rippling forward. We all have that opportunity and it's a huge power.

To stay in the moment and live each day to the maximum. You never know when it’s going to be taken away.

I’ve a deplorable tendency to become entrenched in my own prejudices: If I dislike an artist, an art form, or an idea (jazz, ballet, certain kinds of fiction) it is extremely difficult to get me to change my mind, and all evidence presented to the contrary will be discarded and very likely mocked. Of course, nobody suffers but me.

Like it’s worth being alive.

I’m monstrously judgmental. It’s like talking to the pope.

I have never been able to become an atheist and, even though I know it is completely irrational and cannot be backed up, I think when I die I’m going to glory.

My A-level results in 1998. I flunked my history A-level and lost my place at Cambridge. It broke my heart for years; now I’m really glad, because I pull out the whole “I went to a polytechnic” thing. But at the time for a teenager who was rather pleased with herself, it was absolutely devastating.

Not being loved.