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

— Matt Haig

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

— Matt Haig

Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.

— Matt Haig

Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.

— Matt Haig

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 Fellatio. Furthermore, 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.

— Matt Haig

How to stop time: kiss. How to travel in time: read. How to escape time: music. How to feel time: write. How to release time: breathe.

— Matt Haig

Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon).... And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.

— Matt Haig

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode. Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.

— Matt Haig

Humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.

— Matt Haig

I couldn't believe it. I had broken the law simply by not wearing clothes.

— Matt Haig