Matt Haig

“I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don’t really think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Look at the sky; remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity in order to see the smallness of yourself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Teenagers watch and listen to all kinds of things. It is the nature of being a teenager to seek out intense stuff. Stuff about death and sex and love and fear. Teenagers are the bravest, most curious, most philosophical, most open-minded readers there are, which is why so many less-than-young adults like writing for them.”

“Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Blood doesn't satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.”

“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.”