Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly … - Martin Amis

One recalls John Updike’s argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

You are as well prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you – look at the burnish of you.