It's important to say that depression has biological underpinnings, and that while medications do not seem to create irreversible changes in the brain, repeated depressive episodes do.
Writing 'The Noonday Demon' turned me into a professional depressive, which is a weird thing to be. A class at the university I attended assigns the book and invited me to be a guest lecturer.
If you look at the language of illness, you can use it to describe race - you could experience race as an illness. You can experience income level, at many different levels, as a form of illness. You can experience age as an illness. I mean, it's all got an illness component.
I'm endlessly intrigued by stories, and I love helping someone to formulate his or her story. I can drift off when I'm reading pure abstraction, but the narratives of human lives hold my attention every time.
A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.
I am not a great believer in the idea that journalistic neutrality means you have to abandon the people you talk to.
Never forget that the truest luxury is imagination, and that being a writer gives you the leeway to exploit all of the imagination's curious intricacies, to be what you were, what you are, what you will be, and what everyone else is or was or will be, too.
Every stage of life longs for others. When one is young and eager, one aspires to maturity, and everyone older would like nothing better than to be young.
Most people imagine that resolving particular problems will make them happy. If only one had more money, or love, or success, then life would feel manageable. It can be devastating to realize the falseness of such tempered optimism.
My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.
Parenting involves two separate activities. You have to change your child in that you need to educate your child and instill moral values in them. But you also need to celebrate your child for who he or she is and make them feel really good.
A breakdown involves getting to the point at which your mental state prevents you from doing the normal things of your everyday life. I remember from my own experience that I was completely ambushed by mine.
Parenting is no sport for perfectionists.
Nowadays, people often ask me when I came out, generalising from the experience of many young people who announce themselves to the world on a particular afternoon. But I did not divorce my reticence in a single sharp break. Rather, I seeped out like a spreading wine stain.
Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows.
One the one hand, the simple fact that there are children and that I do have an effect on them has been one of the most potent antidepressants that I've ever had. And on the other hand, there are moments when I feel imprisoned by the reality that I can no longer make my decisions just for myself, that I have to consider the interests of others.
Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame. But not yet.
I think that people are most comfortable when the world is orderly. I think there's the sense that when you begin questioning basic distinctions, such as the distinction between being male and being female, it represents a threat to the social order.
I'm attached to my children with whatever flaws they have, and if some glorious angel broke through the living room ceiling and offered to exchange them for other, better children, I'd cling to my kids and pray away this specter.
Fortunately for me, my mother loved travel. Our first non-beach family trip abroad - to England, France, and Switzerland - came when I was 11, and thereafter, we often tagged along on my father's European business trips.
