“Negativity is never an option”

“Love is mental illness going in and mental illness coming out. In between, you do a lot of laundry.”

“Learning how to play an instrument has always been near the top of my to-do list, but what are the chances now? There's little downtime with a column and a two-year-old, and after reading Goldilocks and the three Bears and going through half a bottle of wine with dinner on an average evening, imagining a day when I join Nathaniel on the Elgar Cello Concerto is not a vision but a hallucination. I'm at the point where the things on your to-do list get transferred to a should-have-done list, and one reason I write a column is for the privilege of vicariously sampling other worlds, dropping in with my passport, my notebook and my curiosity.”

“Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading.”

“I can't survive,' he once told me of his refusal to come indoors,'if I can't hear the orchestra the way I like to hear it.”

“.. a friend is someone who inspires, who challenges, who sends you in search of some truer sense of yourself..”

“Mental illness doesn't choose the most talented or the smartest or the richest or the poorest. It shows no mercy and often arrives like an unexpected storm, dropping an endless downpour on young dreams.”