A good book should leave you, slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind -- a struggle which had engaged me for several months -- might have a fatal outcome.

I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each sentence, even—as I go along.

I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility -- as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.

Through the healing process of time-and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases-most people survive depression which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.

My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.

And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.

Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.

I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.

I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time -- for jittery people.

Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.

I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but yes, a human being.

Depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases.

We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write -- like myself -- college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

Reading--the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.