Matt Haig (born 3 July 1975) is a British novelist and journalist. He has written both fiction and non-fiction for children and adults often in the speculative fiction genre.
The possibility of pain is where love stems from
Avice for a human. 87. Dark matter is needed to hold galaxies together. Your mind is a Galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. 88. Which is to say: don't kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.
Blood doesn't satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.
Laughter, along with madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.
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.
There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.
And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.
Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.
Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.
Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.
If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.
All that humans create serves solely to lessen the terror of existence.
Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.
A book is a map. There will be times in your life when you will feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. There is not a problem in existence that has not been eased, somewhere and at some time, by a book. I want you to remember that. The answers have all been written. And the more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.
The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.
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.
If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.
Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations.
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.
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?