Alain De Botton
speaker
1,037 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
What is this thing about hotel rooms and, you know, sexual relationships?
Right.
In a hotel room, you're allowed to return to a view of your partner as an independent being.
You don't own them.
They were around before you were.
They could walk away from you.
They don't exist simply through the prism of your own kind of relationship.
And suddenly that's deeply exciting and you want to kind of bridge the distance again.
So I think, you know, the best thing to do is to create a little bit of distance in order for that distance then to become an attractive thing to want to bridge.
It's funny that you mentioned Jane Austen because she was very much in my mind when I wrote this book.
Not that there's any kind of immediate similarity, but her vision of the novel is primarily an educational vision.
I mean, she's seeing it as a kind of Christian moralist.
She wants her characters to grow and develop.
And the whole point of the novel is to show us how two people who are quite immature grow up
And she wants our reader, she wants her readers to do the same thing.
And this sounds quite unfashionable.
It's like, oh, this is a lesson.
I thought it was a bit of fun.
But I think that the true mission of the novel is to kind of educate the reader.
It's almost like it should be like a flight simulator, a life simulator, where safely in the kind of cockpit, in this artificial cockpit...
Showing 761–780 of 1,037 · page 39 of 52
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