Anne Rice Quotes

I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

It's funny - for a long time, I didn't know I was writing a book. I was writing stories. For me, each story took so long and took so much out of me, that when I finished it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I've poured everything from myself into this, and then I'd get depressed for a week. And then once I was ready to write a new story, I would want to write about something that was completely different, so I would search for a totally different character with a different set of circumstances.

There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad.

I had this sense that I was part of, sort of a lineage of artists and writers through history that have had mood disorders.

I have a hard time being happy, and I think a lot of creative people suffer with that when life gets real happy.

Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating depression throughout my childhood, and depression is nothing if not static.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

'Supermodel' was a hard record for me; it was an emotional record to write. I was purging a lot of stuff with that album, and I think the one thing I didn't really consider, that I'd be supporting it for two years and living in that state of mind every night.

Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

I went to school for one year. It was the best experience but the worst experience. The best experience because I was, like, 'Oh, now I know why kids are so depressed.' But it was the worst experience because I was depressed.

Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

It is well known that panic, despair, depression, hate, rage, exasperation, frustration all produce negative biochemical changes in the body.

Writing I think, out of what all of us do, writing is the hardest. You're the only who start with nothing except what's up here. You do that. It's really hard I think, acting is not.

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.

After each creative act one has to be sustained by one's strength of character, by a moral sense, by I don't know what, lest one tumble.

When I am attached by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

To be a judge you don't have to know about books, you have to be skilled at picking shrapnel out of your head.

I read the most extravagant things about people who suffer and depress because of things written about them.

It’s just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he’d forget my water or food and I’d cry and cry and cry.” She stops talking and looks out the window. “I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors.

Depression is the flip side of creative inspiration but it can be useful. It's telling you to stop for a little bit. You can become so fully absorbed in the world of creative work that it can lead to some imbalance in your life.

..Since depression is a genetic biological illness, like diabetes, or low thyroid, it wasn't lack of character, laziness, or something I could "snap out of"-it would be like trying to snap out of a toothache.