I think the only life experience that I have to offer out of this is something we all know in the abstract but don't experience in practice very much. That is that you can survive an awful lot of bad stuff, so long as your mind is intact. I'm afraid that's the only life experience I have to offer.

Not to take anything for granted.

One’s created sense of self is not who you are. The present moment is all we have.

I think that is the most important lesson you learn in life, that you have to be ready to make a compromise. You do not compromise your principles, but you have to be ready to compromise. You have to understand that you cannot get your way 100 percent. Life is too complicated. You are not an island, and you work in a social setting, and you need to understand that you work always — at the family level, at the society level — to work out the compromise that is perceived to be fair. You don’t get 100 percent of what you want, but at least you will get the basic minimum that you require.

On X, I am regularly called a traitor, a fraud, a grifter, a weakling, a narcissist, a coward and a child molester.

Scrappy, quixotic, curious.

Carelessness of truth and others.

A painting of a man who was killed on the Dutch coast in 1600.

Being too thin-skinned.

I become very anxious if I think I’ve hurt someone.