"Any place where journeys begin and end is an interesting one - train stations, ports, even a bus station can be exciting. But airports are the best, big international airports. It’s because of the sheer numbers of people there, and how different they all are. And all their different reasons for being there: to come back, to start again, to get in, to leave forever, to go to worship, to work, to wave off, to blow people up. Airports are reminders that the world is still a huge, diverse and exciting place, and when you’re in one you get that feeling of being everywhere and nowhere."

"The most famous moment in all of Proust, the moment that launches the entire monumental project, is a moment of pure distraction: when the narrator, Marcel, eats a spoonful of tea-soaked madeleine and finds himself instantly transported back to the world of his childhood. Proust makes it clear that conscious focus could never have yielded such profound magic: Marcel has to abandon the constraints of what he calls “voluntary memory”—the kind of narrow, purpose-driven attention that Adderall, say, might have allowed him to harness—in order to get to the deeper truths available only by distraction. That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness."