This much I know

This much I know

Alain de Botton, writer and philosopher, 36, London

A short lecture on Plato in the middle of a television documentary always goes down well, in my experience.

I think my homeland, Switzerland, is a fascinating country. If you scratch below the negative images, you find one of the world's oldest democracies, a republican place, a classless society. I've often been accused of vulgarity by people who see themselves as the guardians of high culture. But I think that if high culture is to survive, it's got to engage with life as it's lived now.

Architects forget that our response to buildings is quite autobiographical. If you happened to kiss someone at the foot of a hideous glass tower, the hideous glass tower will seem like the promise of happiness.

It's important to get words like beauty, happiness, prettiness - words associated with naivety - back into discussions of architecture and literature, because they belong right at the core of it.

Culture helps us to feel less lonely. I try to connect my own life with culture. I go to see an art exhibition, I read a book, and I apply it to the world I see around me.

There's a classic category of melancholic adolescents who are overly drawn to literature: they become journalists, academics, publishers, and it's a melancholic slice of society.

The thing about New Labour is that most of their ideas and pronouncements are very wise and utopian; it's the delivery of them that's been catastrophic.

My greatest hope for my son is that I bring him up so that he doesn't feel the need for poetry, for philosophy, that I felt as an adolescent - that he's more at home in the world without the mediation of books.

I have a very poor imagination. I generally only describe and respond to things that I see.

There's a fear that if you talk about concepts like beauty you'll sound like an idiot. It's a bit like literature - if you go to university and do a literature degree, the one thing that no one ever says is that a book might make you cry.

My first book was called Essays in Love. I envisaged it as a series of essays. I sold it to a publisher who said, 'Look, it's a novel, we're going to stick "A Novel" on it.' There's a feeling in Britain that to be a writer is to be a novelist, and it took me a while to get the courage to do what I wanted to do, which is to write essays.

There shouldn't be a conflict between good things and commercial success. There's often a belief that if it sells, it must be bad, or if it sells, it must be good. Neither of those is true.

I'm wary of being romantic about mental problems. For every Baudelaire there are 1,000 people who are just plain miserable, and on anti-psychotic drugs or whatever. I've experienced too much of that to feel romantic about it.

If you have a second job as well as being a writer, it needn't be as a public intellectual: you might work at the foreign office or you might run a shop, or you could be an engineer; there are actually lots of jobs that feed very well into writing. Jeanette Winterson has a deli.

As a writer all you can do is comment on the world, but not change it.

· Alain de Botton will take part in the debate 'My Kind of Town: Architecture and Urban Identity', to be held in the Palazzo Contarini, Venice, at 2.30pm on 9 September as part of the 2006 Venice Biennale

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