Andrew Solomon

Oh yes, I certainly have low days. I feel that in treating the depression, it's not so much that I've become happier as it is that I can be unhappy in better ways. ”

The anxiety phase of my first depression lasted six months. It was incredibly paralyzing. ”

When I'm not depressed, I draw strength and beauty from depression; when I am depressed, I find no such things. ”

Dealing with depression effectively is a mark not of weakness, but of strength. ”

I'm endlessly intrigued by stories, and I love helping someone to formulate his or her story. I can drift off when I'm reading pure abstraction, but the narratives of human lives hold my attention every time. ”

I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry. ”

We need to acknowledge that families come in multiple shapes and sizes, that love is not a finite asset, and that caregiving involves more than a genetic imperative. ”

If you look at the language of illness, you can use it to describe race - you could experience race as an illness. You can experience income level, at many different levels, as a form of illness. You can experience age as an illness. I mean, it's all got an illness component. ”

Nowadays, people often ask me when I came out, generalising from the experience of many young people who announce themselves to the world on a particular afternoon. But I did not divorce my reticence in a single sharp break. Rather, I seeped out like a spreading wine stain. ”

I was kind of a scaredy-cat as a kid, and I made a very deliberate decision at some point that I was not going to let fear rule my life or determine my experience. That wasn't so easily accomplished. ”