Quotes by Matt Haig

A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found.

People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free.

I moved from place to place and from time to time like an arrow immune to gravity.

Don't always know why I kept moving, but it never -- for long -- felt like an option not to. Grim determination?

Obey your head. Obey your heart. Obey your gut. In fact, obey everything except commands.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non upgraded existence.

Twice as many women as men will suffer a serious bout of depression in their lives.

One in five people gets depression at some point in their life. Though obviously more than that will suffer from mental illness.

You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic. It doesn't have always have an obvious case.

Anxiety and depression are an interesting mix. In many ways they are opposite experiences, and yet mix them together and you don't get a happy medium.

Anxiety is the partner of depression. It accompanies half the cases of depression. Sometimes it triggers depression.

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.

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.

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.

It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing.

History was, is, a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards, but you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

The future isn't real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.

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.

In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one.

She realized that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.

One thing that has remained constant, across four centuries, has been the desire for a British person to fill a silence with talk of the weather, and whenever I have lived there I was no exception to this rule.

Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try.

Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes.

Happiness is not good for the economy.
We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves.

And yet, when everything is alien the alien becomes familiar.

Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are Escape Routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.

She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.

Legacy. What a meaningless thing. All that work for a future in which they don't appear.

It's between life and death where the shelves go on and a book allows you to try on another life via choices and to undo your regrets. ~Mrs. Elm.

He was, like so many of the men made large by history, rather mediocre in the flesh, the fine tailoring highlighting rather than hiding his physical shortcomings. … A man made more for grand dinners than seafaring.

Think of how detached we are from nature. How we have to do so much to it before we can bottle it and put the name 'wild' on it.

I am afraid that is, as they say, impossible. Time moves forwards. We have the luxury of time but we still can't reverse it. We can't stop it. We are one-way traffic, just the same as all these mayflies.

Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No.

But do I want to live?

Yes. YES.

A thousand times, yes.

You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books.

But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn't perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.

Minds are unique. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.

There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

I couldn't believe it. I had broken the law simply by not wearing clothes.

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.

The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise.

I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.

Tears were a kind of language and I felt all language was far away from me. I was beneath tears. Tears were what you shed in purgatory. By the time you were in hell it was too late.

After all, humans -- especially adult ones -- want to believe the most mundane truths possible. They need to, in order to stop their world-views, and their sanity, from capsizing and plunging them into the vast ocean of the incomprehensible.

We are being taught to think of a time different to the time we are in. Exam time. Job time. When-we-are-grown-up time.

Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these normal human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.

Well, you can take that fire and put it in the ocean.

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.

The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.

In one life she only ate toast.

There are two types of friends: actual friends, and the other kind.

If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

Perhaps a wish was just a hope with better aim.

Blood doesn't satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.

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.

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.

Life is like a chimney -- you sometimes have to get through the dark before you see the light.

As civilisation advances, so does indifference.

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.

And besides, libraries aren't just about books. They are one of the few public spaces we have left which don't like our wallets more than us.

Laughter, along with madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.

At school, I wasn't as interested in mathematics. I did OK, but at the earliest point I could stop doing math, I stopped.

Depression is kind of quantum physics of thought and emotion. It reveals what is normally hidden. It unravels you.

Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?

People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.

And I walked across the gravel, towards the road and somewhere in the universe of my soul a fiery, life-giving star collapsed, and a very black hole began to form.

The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.

Advice for a human 86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.

Dark matter is needed to hold galaxies together. Your mind is a Galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile.

I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest writer of all time. He has a mediocre 3.7 average on Goodreads.

Loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe.

We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen?

Are you someone who watches life, or someone who participates?

Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations.

Because prime numbers are fucking serious, man. Some serious shit. They can make you lose it. They're like sirens. They call you in with their isolated beauty and before you know it you are in some major mind-shit.

There is no rejection, there is only redirection.

Is happiness the aim?
I don't know. I suppose I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good,.

The craving for the thing is rarely met by the satisfaction of getting it. And so we crave more. And the cycle repeats. We are encouraged to want what will only make us want more.

We are, in short, encouraged to be addicts.

Doubts are like swallows. They follow each other and swarm together.

People only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.