Michael Palin Quotes

I think every human being has a level of melancholy in life and in general.

I've definitely had times in my life where I've been depressed and not able to do anything at all.

I think I ran so hard and so fast, in a lot of ways, from my life and I kind of took a fall. It was like - what do they call it? - post-traumatic stress syndrome.

It's so easy for me to fall back into depression. I think it comes with having money. I don't have to work. I could be sitting bored and depressed at home with a bag on my head.

I was copeless. Not just hopeless, but copeless. I tried to keep on working because I was ashamed of acknowledging the fact that I was depressed. You don't use that word.

I never really thought of myself as depressed so much as paralyzed by hope.

There were only two times in my life when I've actually felt down about things and gotten myself into a full mental mess. One of the times was in 1982. I had a horrible time for a few months and felt pretty desperate. Then again in 1984, for various reasons, not all of them within my control. Since then, I just wander in and out of black moods.

I don't think I suffered with depression, I don't think I'm a depressed type of person - I just think I suffered a depression to do with snooker, and I just couldn't handle it. I could go out and play, but take me out of there and I couldn't do life. It was a nightmare, my life just felt like a bit of a nightmare.

Although, my experience when I've been depressed, not only am I too depressed to sit down and write a song, I'm too depressed to pick up my feet. So if you can at least write about it, you're halfway away from it.

No one had ever educated me on mental health. I really didn't understand why I would be feeling high on life, and everything was brilliant, and then suddenly I would be crashing into a deep hole.

I'm not going to lie: you do get down sometimes, but I wouldn't say I was ever depressed; that's too hard a word. But you do become bored, because all you've done in your life is fight and box.

The thing about those conditions [anxiety and depression] that sucks the worst is that you don't address the root cause, so you never see it coming. What's worse is when you don't even KNOW what the root cause is, you can never fix the problem. So that's what's really scary.

If things were half as bad as some people persist in believing, I'd have retired with a bottle of Scotch and a pistol a long time ago.

My life sucks when I’m only half-aware of it. If I quit drinking and saw what it’s really like, I’d probably jump off a bridge.

I used to think drinking was the only way to be happy. Now I know there is no way to be happy.

I have had issues with depression all my life, and it's probably true to say there was a tendency towards it even when I was very young, during my schooldays. There was often - and this is quite common with comics - a sense of not feeling as if I belonged anywhere.

I've battled with that type of stuff, but what I've found is that by doing stand-up, I've actually learned about depression and how to combat it. I don't have clinical, but I've definitely had my bouts with it.

Stress is not the spice of life any more than arsenic is. And without it, you won't feel bored.

There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.

To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.

As long as I live, I know I'll have feelings. And that's what I'm passionate about.

I spent a lot of my life holding back my cries, and I want to change that because it's not good for me.

People respond differently to people who are grieving. They reach out. But depression is so very isolating. It's hard to explain to anyone who has never been depressed how isolating it is. Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.

The way that people feel changes everything. Feelings are forces. They cause us to time travel. And to leave ourselves, to leave our bodies. I would be that kind of psychologist who says, 'You're absolutely right - there are monsters under the bed.'