Matt Haig

“There are as many versions of a book as there are readers.”

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

“He has spent weeks on the pristine, frosty shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He has drunk himself stupid in the fairy-tale blood brothels of old Dubrovnik, lounged in red-smoke dens in Laos, enjoyed the New York blackout of 1977, and more recently, feasted on Vegas showgirls in the Dean Martin suite at the Bellagio. He has watched Hindu abstainers wash away their sins in the Ganges, danced a midnight tango on a boulevard in Buenos Aires, and bitten into a faux geisha under the shade of a shogun pavilion in Kyoto.”

“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.”

“To read, to seek, to know.”

“Confine your imagination. Do not lose yourself to dangerous daydreams. Do not sit and ponder and dwell on a life you are not living. Do something active. Exercise. Work harder. Answer your emails. Fill your diary with harmless social activities. By doing, we stop ourselves imagining. And imagining for us is a fast-moving car heading toward a cliff.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“She understands enough of what is going on. She understands that he wants to save her, more than anything in the world. She understands what he understands, that if only he could save her, he could save himself. She understands also that she loves him, and as she stays inside his helpless stare, she knows that fate is something she has to steer herself.”

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

“Grief is terror, in its most undiluted form.”

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