Western culture likes binaries: life feels less frightening when we can separate good and evil into tidy heaps, when we split off the mind from the body, when men are masculine and women are feminine.

My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. At the worst stage of major depression, I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on that tree's high branches belonged to the vine.

We must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

You can exorcise the demons of schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside them. But it's much harder with depressed people because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies.

A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy...I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it

Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat - it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.

Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits.

Fortunately for me, my mother loved travel. Our first non-beach family trip abroad - to England, France, and Switzerland - came when I was 11, and thereafter, we often tagged along on my father's European business trips.

As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn't get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.

I loathe having a fragile brain and knowing as I make any plan that I should provide for the possibility that my mind may betray me at short notice.