YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Haig

lines on the record: 34
first: 2025-06-24
most recent: 2025-06-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Of a young adult in your 20s, you don't really appreciate how much you will change. By the time you're old, like me, with my sock of tennis balls. And”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My favorite word in the world, especially when I'm depressed, is a really unpoetic word neuroplasticity, which they talk a lot about in Alzheimer's research and various other things about how our brain changes structure. And our brain always changes structure over time. And so we are literally different people to who we were 10 years ago. We literally have a different brain. And every experience, you know, tonight your brain won't have expanded, but it will have changed in some way because our brains are changing over time. And so remembering that, you know, sometimes the person you stay alive for isn't maybe an external person, but it's a future person of you who doesn't quite exist in the way they will. And they'll be grateful you hang around. And that, when you're younger, is really hard to see. Because when you're sort of”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Practical things like with agrophobia. I overcame agrophobia by obviously agrophobia is a total fear of going outside, but with me it was a fear of what I'd feel outside, which was I'd have a panic attack instantly as soon as I was outside under a sky. I think I Had in mind Howard Hughes and what I didn't want to be. I didn't want to be the inverted commas mad, agrophobic. Who can't leave their own room? So that fear became useful to beat the other fear and would force me out of the house and do things. But I think it comes back to change.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of your minds is never through yourself. And that can mean different things. Sometimes, depending on, like if I have anxiety, not depression, but if I have anxiety, what I find helps is like curiosity. And it's often impossible, but if you can, possibly, get into something and it can be anything. I can remember when Game of Thrones first season three or something and I first got into Game of Thrones, I was having panic attacks again, I was trying to dreadful. And I just decided I was suddenly like a game of thrones geek and I watched all the early seasons of Gamer Frones. I'm not really write fantasy, but I'm not really like a Tolkien kind of fantasy person. But I really got into Gamer Thrones or it could be like learning. That can help if it's a sort of healthy obsession that balances your obsession.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you need to remind yourself that life's worth of living. But also there's a purpose to remembering the opposite, to remembering the very worst times that you've survived. And as you get older, you've had more survival. And so that helps me. There's another thing I wrote about. The way out of your”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it becomes easier, to be honest, as you get older and as you have, I don't know if you think the same Brownie, but I feel like... The knowledge that you've done it before is sometimes the one thing that you hold on to. And so the only advantage, I suppose, of bad times and certainly bad mental illness times is that you can use them in the future as sort of ammunition. I think in Reason Stale I either talk about a bank of bad days where you can sort of store up, you know, people always say the opposite, don't they? They say remember good times and times when you're happy and there's a purpose for that.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feeling in writing. I mean, that would be my only writing advice to people. I'm not good at the technical writing advice, but I think people miss out the feeling aspect. It's like music. Trying to find that sincerity is important. So I think if you want a reader to feel something, you have to feel it yourself. So you have to kind of get into the, you have to tap into an emotion that's inside you to find the fuel to write something like life impossible was really, even though it's a book about Abifa and it's science fiction and lots of weird stuff happened, it's really a book about recovery and that feeling of the world being like alien to you. You know, when you come around and you never thought you'd enjoy life again and then you suddenly see grass and the sky and you drink orange juice and all these mundane things become the most magical things because you can experience things again and you're out of that state of anadonia and you can...”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can go into that hyper focus mode where I just feel like a terrible human being for three months and that I won't be able to listen to what's going on around me, but I will be able to focus on the book until it's finished. And I'm scared of it falling out of my head, so I have to write super fast. until it's done because my memory is not great so I'm scared I'm going to lose it and I don't really write notes I'm not good at writing notes So that part, the actual proper writing is about three months. Then editing can be dragged out a bit. I hate editing. I really hate editing because I don't know. It takes a lot to conjure.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It depends because for longest process is the process before you really properly writing it, where you're just getting the ideas in your head. And often that happens while you're working on something else. You'll be slightly working on a future thing. Midnight Library was something an idea I'd had but not worked out how to do it for a good decade. I think there, and this one as well, I've wanted to do the one I've just written is kind of time travel-ish. I'd wanted to do that for ages and I've not worked out the device. And then I read something in a science magazine, which made me think, ah, I know how I could do this to make it work. It depends, but the most of the writing is done when you're not writing. And then I get quite speedy when I'm writing, because I'm not a planner. I'm very ADHD.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's so many good movies that are just, yeah, I went to see that Furiosa, you know, the Mad Max film, and I was loving it for like an hour. And then I was like, it was like Wednesday. And I was like, I've been to the toilet 72 times.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm nervous. But yeah, it's a book and I've written it. And I can tell you it's about 70,000 words long at the moment, but it might lengthen. That's the perfect, I feel like the perfect movie is one hour, 35 minutes. And no movies like that anymore. Every movie in 1985 was that, yeah.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of. But it happened organically. I wasn't sitting down to do that. It just became, because the concept related, because that's where my sort of head is drawn, the concept related and it was a sort of afterlife thing and it was a time travel. I'm saying too much, but it was kind of related to it.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've just finished writing on a bit. This very morning I had the word from my editor. Francis Bickmore at Cannongate Said that we are ready to show it to the other sort of publishers internationally and things. So yeah, I'm feeling quite giddy today because I finished a book and I'm not literally not allowed to say, I don't even know what the title is at the moment. It's got a title, but we've got another possible title. So I'm not going to say anything about the title. I'm not going to say anything about story. I will say it's kind of more related to the world of the Midnight Library and it's not a sequel but it's something that I'm very very Happy about at this point in time”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My legs, and I was very sore. So I was doing this every morning and I was like, we're sore legs. Yeah, write what you know. And so I had been a sort of 72 year old Grace Winters for two weeks. Wow. I know all about being an old lady now. It's fine.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this long cafeter that they shove up your sort of calf and they burn the vein from the inside. It makes me feel a bit weird thinking about it. And so you're not feeling pain, but you're feeling it. You're feeling what's happening. And I was just sort of focusing as a Van Gogh print in the sort of medical room where I was having this done. I was just focusing on the swirly sort of Van Gogh sky and sort of thinking about in any situation, however uncomfortable, embarrassing, painful it is, there's always a little spot of beauty in it if you focus. I was just focusing, I was just trying to think of Vanguard and ignoring the fact that I was in this situation. And after the operation for two weeks, I had to wear these very tight compression stockings.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While I was feeling like a woman of a certain age, because another thing I inherited from my mother was bad veins and my legs. And I had to have my veins removed from my legs. Not for vanity, although they did look bloody awful, but because I had a blood clot in one of my veins, not like a really dangerous kind of blood clot, but a pretty needed it operated on kind of blood clot. And so I was having this operation and I was researching this operation. And 95% of people who have this operation are female over the age of 70. I was feeling like, and after the operation, and it's quite an intense operation because it's local anesthetic, but they give you there's this long catheter. After the sort of 20 injections are given both legs,”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and making it not my age, it became a character that I could then warm to and feel for. And in the Midnight Library, to be fair, there's not actually much description of Nora. She's not even physically described apart from having brown hair. There was one physical description of her, and that's it. She's not physically described. And that was deliberate so people could sort of put themselves in her. She's sort of like a... Every person that you can male or female, you could put yourself in. I wasn't giving her situations were quite sort of niche in some ways, but they weren't too gender specific or age specific sometimes. With Grace in this book, that was always going to be a woman of a certain age. Because I got the idea for the character.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“40 something male person. Adam wasn't there. I think it's like, you know, like when you sort of see yourself in the mirror and you don't really know what you look like. I find it very hard to judge if I'm getting, if a person's a character or if it's just a sort of like an assemblage of stuff. Because to create a character, I think personally it helps to not be the character, to actually, for it to be a character. So simply by changing the gender from Adam to Nora”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nora in the Midnight Library wasn't. She was originally Adam and I wrote a whole book of Nora as Adam. The first draft of Midnight Library, it was about a man who was 10 years older than Nora, who was called Adam. It just didn't work. There was a flatness to it. And I thought I was going to have to abandon the book, but I didn't want to abandon the book because I like the concept. But then I realized it was a character. The thing I'm really bad at is writing, not writing men as such, but writing men my own age, men who are sort of versions of me. I can do it in nonfiction, but I can't do it in fiction. I just can't write.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I can say something about this page because I know where this came from. I drove to Cala.org. I parked in the dusty car park and passed a sign by a restaurant that said, please do not leave any values in the car can be stolen. That is a real sign in ABA. I like it because you get a lot of that in a beefa, the signs that the restaurants leave. I reached Atlantis Scuba and looked around for Alberto, but he wasn't there. There was only the black and white, wide-horned goat Nostradamus. This is probably quite confusing if no one's read this book. He was outside the Atlantis scuba hut enjoying a bowl full of oats on the ochre dirt path. Alberto had been right when he said that Nostradamus was a misanthropic soul. Wafted towards me along with his musky scent, which is the very worst extract in the”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mum is a drama teacher. She used to worry that I mumbled too much and didn't project my voice. And so she made me have speech and drama lessons when I was younger. So I'd go every sort of Tuesday evening to Mrs. Mumby's house and then be about four. shy kids whose mothers had made them come to have confidence had obviously total adverse effects because you just underlining the fact that this is really normal and so every time I open a book to read it out I just suddenly become like 11 years old again and like I'm performing you know if I'm chatting to you I'm just wanging on about”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's not that. It's not because it's just that... Oh God, I'm talking about my mum again, but my mum was a drama teacher.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now that's because I get a little bit political. That's the other thing it's very hard in 2025. If you're a sensitive person, you're responding like a pinball to the world, you inevitably get political. And the way that intertwines with mental health, I feel like, I don't know. I think... It's an interesting position, isn't it? When you're responding to things, but you're also the person that people respond to in real time, social media. It can be kind of a... Head fucked.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes a difference. Literally the last DM I got that I looked at this morning was from an anonymous account that just said you are bullshit and I was like my voice is in my head have now got their own social media account. You don't need voices in your head. You just need Instagram. To get people telling you you're bullshit. Okay, bangs for the pet talk, mum.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone very, very close to me has gone through psychosis recently and I definitely would not want to go through what they went through. But what I'm saying is if you're measuring miseries, if you're measuring something that makes you want, if you're telling someone who literally was in a life-threatening situation for months of a life that was a lesser version of mental illness, it's like Anything can be serious”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cry, and so you think they'd be better off without me. So yes, on paper, you know, it, not even on paper, it is luck. And I wouldn't want to go into the timeline where I didn't have that, but it doesn't always feel like luck. And when you're at rock bottom, you know, having a little thing I get confused. And it's not, and I'm sure it's something you've had as well. And I'm sure anyone who writes about any kind of mental illness. Where, you know, Bog standard vanilla depression is measured against borderline personality disorder or psychosis. This sort of thing. And it's like...”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Parents, I could go and live with, supportive partner, very lucky rare things that with hindsight, I can be totally grateful for. But I think what was happening when I wrote Reason is still alive, I was placing myself into the mindset I was into the mindset I was when I was ill and when I was recovering. And in that mindset, I didn't think in terms of privilege. I didn't think in terms of luck because depression can flip everything. It's like it's the worst PR agency in your head. So yes, I was lucky to have a partner, but what depression was saying is you're a burden on that partner. That's a reason for you not to be here. You're slowing everyone down. You're weighing everyone down. Same with my parents. I was living with my mum when she was a stressed-out teacher going through an offsteading inspection. And I was adding more stress and making a parent.”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depression being twisting everything. So people talk about one of the things that people slag me off for a reason to stay alive was that I didn't acknowledge the sort of look and privilege I had of having like...”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can be guilty about real things, but I can be also very guilty about nothing at all. And this is the interesting thing about depression is working out what's real and what's not because a lot of the criticism, and I did get quite a lot of criticism for reasons to stay alive eventually, because when something becomes that big and you become like a mascot for mental health, or, you know, but you're not representing it in the right way to what someone else is going through, that was the thing I struggled with because I'd try and speak universally because I felt that was what I was trying to do. But then people were saying, oh, why is he speaking for me? And that would become, I've lost my train of thought. What was I talking about? I was going into therapy mode. Where was the gun kill?”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had guilt, it's very hard, isn't it? Because you don't want to say, I don't have things to feel guilty about because we kind of, I mean, all of us, I mean, I'm nearly 50. I've got lots of things to feel guilty about throughout the course of my life and lot of selfish behaviors I've done and things like that. And I've got guilty totally about my 20s, even though you could say on the one hand you couldn't help it because you were mentally ill. On the other hand, I was an absolute nightmare. It was a nightmare for Andrea because I'd gone from one extreme to the other overnight. And then she went from girlfriend to carer overnight for years. And then, so then when you have mental health problems and you're not the perfect partner and everything else, and then you have that guilt because she's already gone through that. And yeah, so I have a lot of guilt, but I feel like I can be guilty about...”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, guilt. She's guilt. She's got a kind of legitimate reason for being guilty, but it turns out throughout the course of a book, right? You know, a lot of what she's feeling bad about, she didn't need to be feeling bad about. And I think... I've always”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, she always had to have the signifiers of where a lot of that insecurity came out in me in different ways. But yeah, it's kind of interesting how insecurities are sort of like, you know, it's no one's fault, but they're Domino of insecurity and trauma. All that fun”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember, my mum isn't here, but she was going to come. I do get that she's not here. I do get a lot of my stuff from her. And she will say that. I mean, my mum bless her was adopted and she's never known her parents. She doesn't know who her parents are. I don't know health history or anything like that. And I think that feeling of being, you know, like, because especially in this age now where we're obsessed about identity and who we are and where we fit and our labels and everything. And I think when you were adopted and you never even knew who your parents were, you don't know what kind of, I think that inevitably places you makes you insecure about everything through life because you don't know what class you are. You don't know what you really fit in. So she always went very middle class, you know, and everything had to be...”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, hello to them. I did an event at Edinburgh Book Festival, which I didn't know was being watched online. And I even said in the event, I said, because my mother's not here, and then I started going on a therapy session about my mother said, well, that was interesting Your dad have been watching that for the last hour”
2025-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT