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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Matt Haig

Love

Discipline

Art

" Depression is a horrible, potentially life-threatening illness - but the lives it threatens are almost always those of the people who suffer from it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 need, ultimately, to be able to view mental health with the same clear-headedness we show when talking about physical health. "

" 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. "

" I've always thought feminism had a lot to say about both genders, as it is hard to talk about one without the other. I think men and women alike would benefit from men having a more fluid idea of what being a man is. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Matt Haig

Want

You

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" How clear can I put this? I am not denying female oppression; I am trying to stop it by calling for a more fluid masculinity. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Being a depressive should not imply danger any more than being a man or even a human should. Mental illness isn't a them/us issue; we are all on the scale somewhere. So we must be very careful to resist ignorance and combat the stigma that leads to dangerous silence. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To make 'depression' synonymous with 'dangerous' is as bad as saying 'Muslim' is synonymous with 'terrorist.' "

" I think we get too hung up on categories. Obviously, the book market has to categorise things, and it makes it easier for a reader to go into a bookshop and choose, but as a writer, it helps to get rid of all of that and imagine you are a storyteller around a campfire. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The weirdest thing about a mind is that you can have the most intense things going on in there, but no one else can see them. "

" Depression, for me, wasn't a dulling but a sharpening, an intensifying, as though I had been living my life in a shell, and now the shell wasn't there. It was total exposure. "

Matt Haig

My Life

Living

" 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. "

" 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. "