For me, as a writer, I desperately want to be read. I'm very conscious of readers as I'm writing. I think, 'If you write for yourself, then why don't you just keep it under the bed,' so I definitely write for other people.
— Matt Haig
At school, I wasn't as interested in mathematics. I did OK, but at the earliest point I could stop doing math, I stopped.
Words are the essence of culture. Books are pure essence. They are not for women or for men, but for all of us. Without books, civilisation falls into the dark ages.
I have always enjoyed vampire stuff without ever having been a full vampire geek. I suppose I love the idea of blood thirst because it can say so much about us, not simply about addiction but about all those desires that can tear a family apart.
My mum always said I devoured 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe' at the tender age of four, but frankly, I think that might be a touch of maternal exaggeration.
There are two types of friends: actual friends, and the other kind.
Like most art forms, writing is part instinct and part craft. The craft part is the part that can be taught, and that can make a crucial difference to lots of writers.
If you are an atheist as I am, Shakespeare can be your ideal. Everything is within Shakespeare, especially in his 10 greatest plays. They have life, meaning, understanding, the whole lot.
You don't have to be a creative maverick to have a troubled mind. You just have to be human. There is no 'us' and 'them.' No one is one hundred per cent healthy, physically or mentally.
If you can't give children optimism, then what are you doing?
I think Father Christmas is real because the belief is real. The belief becomes the reality.
Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
To make 'depression' synonymous with 'dangerous' is as bad as saying 'Muslim' is synonymous with 'terrorist.'
Thinking about death makes you analyse what life is. Anxiety makes you curious, and curiosity leads to understanding. I wouldn't be a writer without depression.
It can be difficult for people to talk about it, because there still is that stigma around mental illness. But I would encourage people to do that, because they'll be surprised once they do 'come out' how many other people have had similar experiences.
Human brains - in terms of cognition and emotion and consciousness - are essentially the same as they were at the time of Shakespeare or Jesus or Cleopatra or the Stone Age. They are not evolving with the pace of change.
Books are our umbilical cord to life. They connect us deeply, and with more meaning, to the world. They aren't about escaping from ourselves but expanding ourselves and finding within us the tools we need to survive.
I'm not anti-progress, obviously, but I just think progress needs to be a broader thing than just the technology we can create; it's also how we handle it and our level of awareness.
The aim of any writer, even a fantasy writer, is the pursuit of truth.
Parents can only do what they think is best, with the experience they have. The learning curve for every parent is that there's a limit to how much they can shield children from.
British culture is very cynical sometimes of overt displays of sentimentality, and I think that becomes almost a suspicion of emotion, or a suspicion of someone making a grand statement. It is always easier to be ironic, or 'meta', or coolly postmodern. But I think there is such a thing as authentic sentimentality.
Beauty breeds beauty; truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.
You have to be good. And keep getting better. For every writer taken on, another is dropped. A paradox: you have to rise to stay level.
Creative writing lessons can be very useful, just like music lessons can be useful. To say, as Hanif Kureishi did, that 99.9% of students are talentless is cruel and wrong. I believe that certain writers like to believe they arrived into the world with special, unteachable powers because it is good for the ego.
There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.
Neuroscience is a baby science, a mere century old, and our scientific understanding of the brain is nowhere near where we'd like it to be. We know more about the moons of Jupiter than what is inside of our skulls.
My early novels were written in quite a dark place. I stand by them, but I would never write them again. I think it is subversive to embrace emotional optimism, because it goes against the grain.
Beware of the gap: the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it, and you end up falling through.
Look at the sky; remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity in order to see the smallness of yourself.
It would be lovely to live in a culture where calmness was the aim.
If you took away all pain, if everyone lived forever, everything would be bland, flat and boring; there would be no reason for art, music, newspapers, love because we would all be in a mono state of happiness.
Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you 'admit to.' It is not something you have to blush about; it is a human experience. It is not you. It is simply something that happens to you.
Boys don't cry. But they do. We do. I do. I weep all the time.
It is very hard to explain to people who have never known serious depression or anxiety the sheer continuous intensity of it. There is no off switch.
I think maths is the root of everything. If we understood every area of math, it would lead to improving our sense of science, physics, engineering, space travel... all those great things. Maths is a backbone for it.
Robots are great. I am saying that now so that when a future civilization of robots takes us captive, they will search through the 'Guardian' web archive and realise I said, 'Robots are great,' and then they'll choose to save me.
People, certainly in the U.K., look down on screenwriting as an art form, but I love the discipline of it. Next to the bagginess of novel writing, it almost feels like a martial art.
I suppose the book I really remember loving as a child was one called 'The Outsiders' by S.E. Hinton, about a gang of kids from the wrong side of the tracks in Sixties Oklahoma. I grew up in the Eighties in Nottinghamshire, but this tale of troubled, but essentially good, kids - or 'greasers' - was something I completely connected with.
If you sell the film rights to your book, it doesn't mean there will be a film. I have sold the rights to five books and had zero films made. Take the money and be thankful.
To say that creative writing courses are all useless is almost as silly as saying all editors are useless. Writers of all levels can benefit from other instructive voices.
I'm a firm believer in the connection between the body and the mind: feed one, feed both. I like to run, but only short distances, and fast. I'm no good at long distance. More than six miles, and the knees start to go.
I'd love for mental illness to be seen in the way that other horrible illnesses are. When people get cancer, very few parents will say, 'Oh I feel so bad for giving you so much unhealthy food over the years.'
Depression is an illness. It is not a ticket to genius. It is not an interesting personality quirk. It is horrible and all-consuming and really hurts.
I think it is a luxury and privilege to be sane and well and pessimistic. Because with depression, you have no other option. You don't want that pessimism, because it is crushing you and keeping you down at the bottom of the well.
You don't need the world to understand you. It's fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven't experienced. Some will. Be grateful.
Depressives have led countries, won wars, flown rockets to the moon, made great music. Don't let depression stop you employing someone, and never let it cause you to judge them. Depression is not a person. Like any other illness, it is something that happens to a person. It shouldn't define them.
However much in the foreground depression feels, you are separate to it. This is going to sound cheesy, but I'd say you are the sky. A cloud comes and dominates the sky. But the sky is still the sky. Depression tells you everything is going to get worse, but that's a symptom. Don't give depression power - constantly discredit it.
We often joke about men moaning about being ill, whether it's man flu or anything else. We want them to be silent and strong about these things. And that's quite dangerous when it comes to depression, because talking about it helps. People bottle it up until it's too late.
You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.
Books should be right up there with exercise and diet as something that don't just entertain us but heal us. They tell us we are not alone and fix the pieces of us that can be shattered by reality. They are teachers, and they are friends, and we should never contemplate a world - or a life - without them.
