I've never met anyone who genuinely wanted advice. Most people ask for advice, but they are not in the least interested in what you have to say.

Still, if you don't ask for advice, you end up looking rather like, well, me: pig-headed and wilful.

While it remains my contention that advice is largely a for-display-purposes-only exchange, there have been some very meaningful ideas that have come my way via those conversations.

No surprises here, I take most of my wisdom from dead people.

The best advice I ever got in the history of ever (because it encompasses time and desire and all other things), is from George Eliot, who said, 'It's never too late to be what you might have been.'

Those words have kept me alive.

Now, for more specific things.

On friendship: 'The only way to have friend is to be one,' said Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man with whom I've had very little traffic. But this I know to be true - what he says about friendship has been one of the pillars of my life.

I think this stayed with me, always at the back of my mind, because it's how I felt anyway. And, as earlier noted, I'm pretty good at taking my own advice.

But I've also seen it in motion and not in motion. I've seen the people who are utterly devoted to their friends. I've also seen the people who do all the things you are supposed to do to keep friendships alive, but they do them selfishly. It never looks that way, but deep down, they know they want something in return: praise, thanks, better birthday presents.

And I've never seen it work. So, on the matter of friends, just be there.

On work ethic: Thomas Edison, said, 'There's no substitute for hard work.'

That is, of course, ridiculous. There are many substitutes. There are short cuts and a world of cheating and plagiarism. There is taking it easy and looking up from your hammock and wondering why you don't have a whole lot of more-and-better.

I have never believed in luck. And I don't believe in fate. I'm not even sure I believe in believing. What's left is hard work. Don't ever confuse looking easy for being easy. Lots of people make things look easy. But you don't know what's happening on the withinside. Equally, don't assume that because something looks difficult that it is.

Some people make relationships look easy. Maybe they are, maybe they're not.

Or getting over an illness. Or having a successful career. Sometimes it's hard to see how hard hard work is. If you look at, say, some writers, what you'll see is a lot of used teacups and some threadbare carpet. Not much evidence of hard work.

But if you're on the withinside, you might know that they've been working on drafts for days. That they pace from nervous energy.

So, remember, in the US alone, Edison had over a thousand patents. But only one of them was for his version of the electric lightbulb. Hard work, I tell you.

And now this, the most vexing of them all (either that, or I know all the wrong people). Many years ago, I saw the writing on the wall.

It wasn't fancy graffiti or anything, just a scra