There aren't any fences to the imagination, and so there shouldn't be any for books.
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.
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.
Lots of children have had dark experiences, and if they're not having direct dark experiences, they are thinking about things and learning that life is fragile. You have to acknowledge that side of life to be able to then offer comfort and hope and goodwill.
I'd love for mental illness to be seen in the way that other horrible illnesses are. When people get cancer, very few parents will say, 'Oh I feel so bad for giving you so much unhealthy food over the years.'
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.
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.
Depression is a horrible, potentially life-threatening illness - but the lives it threatens are almost always those of the people who suffer from it.
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.
We need, ultimately, to be able to view mental health with the same clear-headedness we show when talking about physical health.
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.
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.
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.
When I was young, there was no such thing as YA. You simply went from reading children's novels to reading adult novels. So one year, I was reading Tove Jansson, and the next year, I was reading Stephen King.
Beauty breeds beauty; truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.
Look at the sky; remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity in order to see the smallness of yourself.
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.