One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.

— Matt Haig

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.

— Matt Haig

People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?

— Matt Haig

People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.

— Matt Haig

She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box, and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn’t built. It’s in tiny intricate pieces, and although there’s a book of instructions you don’t understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build

— Matt Haig

So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?”“Pretty much.

— Matt Haig

That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action. To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary villages and market towns...

— Matt Haig

That kind of monotony that running generates - the one sound tracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements - became a kind of metaphor for depression.

— Matt Haig

The best way to think of the aging process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.

— Matt Haig

The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.

— Matt Haig