Matt Haig

…human

Don’t be timid. Don’t aim to be liked by all readers. Write a book that will never get a consensus around a table. Write a book you know people will hate and you are probably also writing someone’s favourite ever book.

If your instinct is to write then you are a writer. If it is to just make tons of content in as short a time as possible you are just a useful tool for shareholders.

Had two messages from people yesterday who read Reasons to Stay Alive and all that Andrea has been through with me and they wanted to see her and the truth is she doesn’t like being on social media much… this is an approved one of her yesterday but it could have been twenty years ago because she doesn’t change

Me and my cousin James. The day we first saw The Cure. 23rd July 1989. He was the handsome one on the right. I was the one who looked like the character in a John Hughes movie who had an unrequited crush on Molly Ringwald while she yearned for a future yuppie in a Ferrari blasting OMD. 14 going on 33. I remember the day well. I had travelled to Sussex from Newark-on-Trent and met James and his friends. They were very cool. All eyeliner and bouffant hair. One was openly gay. A big deal for an 80s teenager. We went to London. Carnaby Street. I bought some John Lennon glasses, for some reason. And wore a paisley shirt I had made in Textiles. Then to Wembley for my first ever concert and the closest thing to a spiritual experience I had as a teen. 10,000 boys in eyeliner and one in a paisley shirt. I remember the setlist. Charlotte Sometimes, A Forest, Lullaby, Inbetween Days… as I said earlier this week The Cure are a band you live inside. I was a troubled kid. Mildly criminal. Special needs. Misunderstood. Misfit. But the Cure provided a world for us to live inside. They gave us a place inside our minds for us to exist in the safe gothic shade of the imagination.

Don’t become AI because AI will do bland algorithm clip-bait marketplace slave better than you. There is no marketplace there is just humans and they want humanity.