Top 101 Quotes & Sayings by Matt Haig - Page 2

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.

For me, as a writer, I desperately want to be read. I'm very conscious of readers as I'm writing. I think, 'If you write for yourself, then why don't you just keep it under the bed,' so I definitely write for other people.

My mum always said I devoured 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe' at the tender age of four, but frankly, I think that might be a touch of maternal exaggeration.

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.

At school, I wasn't as interested in mathematics. I did OK, but at the earliest point I could stop doing math, I stopped.

Words are the essence of culture. Books are pure essence. They are not for women or for men, but for all of us. Without books, civilisation falls into the dark ages.

You have to be good. And keep getting better. For every writer taken on, another is dropped. A paradox: you have to rise to stay level.

I have always enjoyed vampire stuff without ever having been a full vampire geek. I suppose I love the idea of blood thirst because it can say so much about us, not simply about addiction but about all those desires that can tear a family apart.

Robots are great. I am saying that now so that when a future civilization of robots takes us captive, they will search through the 'Guardian' web archive and realise I said, 'Robots are great,' and then they'll choose to save me.

The aim of any writer, even a fantasy writer, is the pursuit of truth.

I'm not anti-progress, obviously, but I just think progress needs to be a broader thing than just the technology we can create; it's also how we handle it and our level of awareness.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Advice for a human. 81. You can't find happiness looking for the meaning of life. Meaning is only the third most important thing. It comes after loving and being. 82. 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.

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

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.

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?

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

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

The possibility of pain is where love stems from

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

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

Blood doesn't satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.

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.

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.

You can't just stop technological progress. Even if one country stops researching artificial intelligence, some other countries will continue to do it. The real question is what to do with the technology. You can use exactly the same technology for very different social and political purposes. So I think people shouldn't be focused on the question of how to stop technological progress because this is impossible. Instead the question should be what kind of usage to make of the new technology. And here we still have quite a lot of power to influence the direction it's taking.

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