Matt Haig Quotes

Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.

Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.

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.

You reach a certain age -- sometimes it's fifteen, sometimes it's forty-six -- and you realize the cliche you have adopted for yourself isn't working.

This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.

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

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

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

Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.

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

All that humans create serves solely to lessen the terror of existence.

Kissing is what humans do when words have reached a place they can't escape from.

If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

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

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

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?

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

Beauty breeds beauty, truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.

Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.

Blood doesn't satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.

End-users not technologies shape the market. Consequently marketers need to stay abreast not only of technological developments but also of the way people respond to them.

The possibility of pain is where love stems from

There aren't any fences to the imagination, and so there shouldn't be any for books.

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

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.

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.

Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport

I think Father Christmas is real because the belief is real. The belief becomes the reality.

It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.

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

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.

Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

That kind of monotony that running generates - the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements - became a kind of metaphor for depression.

One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.

The way out is never through yourself.

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.

The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.

(T)here are only two things that are true 100 out of 100 times and that is that you live and also that you die and every other thing is not true or false it is a mix. It is both. It is none.

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

A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.

How to stop time: kiss.How to travel in time: read.How to escape time: music.How to feel time: write.How to release time: breathe.

And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.

No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.

ILikeThe WayThat when youTiltPoemsOn their sideTheyLook likeMiniatureCities FromA long wayAway. SkyscrapersMade outOfWords.

Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.

So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?”“Pretty much.

Be proud to act like a normal human being. Keep daylight hours, get a regular job, and mix in the company of people with a fixed sense of right and wrong.

The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.

The next day I had a hangover.I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.