Michael Redhill Quotes

#1. The reason so many intelligent and creative people suffer from depression is that when you take the risk of being fully conscious, you open Pandora's box, and you can't close it again.

Michael Redhill

#2. I've always loved Houdini, not just because of what he did, but also because of what he stood for. He was a self-made man in a time when the idea of celebrity was still new, and he used his celebrity for good.

Michael Redhill

#3. Sufferers of depression have 'episodes' the same way those who suffer from multiple sclerosis do. It comes, wipes the floor with you, and then somehow returns you to the world. But it comes back.

Michael Redhill

#4. Depression is a surfeit of empathy - a killing empathy - that makes depressives great friends to everyone but themselves. Having a self is a rough business, and depressives can empathize with others who have to deal with it, but not with themselves.

Michael Redhill

#5. I'd fully taken the road many people start on, but most abandon: common sense had given me a miss, and I'd become an artist.

Michael Redhill

#6. I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.

Michael Redhill

#7. I have a strange habit of walking down streets and staring up, rather than looking at shopfronts and stuff like that.

Michael Redhill

#8. No one is depressed when they're asleep, which is why being in bed is such a safe place if you're really down.

Michael Redhill

#9. The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.

Michael Redhill

#10. Charity should be blind to everything but need. Our personal feelings should not determine whose starvation is legitimate.

Michael Redhill

#11. We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.

Michael Redhill

#12. It's no mistake that the moment of impregnation is called conception: at first, parenthood is nothing more than an idea.

Michael Redhill

#13. Having a child is sowing the seeds of your own obsolescence: birth is the fuse that leads to that other thing. You appear, you replace yourself, you die.

Michael Redhill

#14. I wasn't against becoming a dad: I'd had a good childhood, as childhoods go, and as role models, my imperfect parents were as good as or better than most.

Michael Redhill