School was a big source of anxiety for me. I hated school. I have social anxiety, and it developed when I was a kid. I had trouble going to birthday parties. It was always there. I begged my mom to let me be home-schooled at one point for a semester because I was so miserable at school.

We weren't put here to be miserable. We were put here to do the best we can, and we should take our energy and improve our state of being.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

If someone you know makes a bad decision or uses bad judgment, it doesn't mean you have to allow that to alter your attitude. Why should you allow anyone else's bad decisions to send you into a tailspin of misery?

I don't feel guilty about the music I love. If you feel guilty about something you dig, then you should stop feeling guilty about it. One of my favorite albums to this day is the 10th anniversary ensemble cast of 'Les Miserables,' the ultimate cast recording, and it is still something I love listening to top to bottom.

Part of what motivated my writing was anger. I was angry that the daily misery of doctors, nurses, and patients was being trivialised into soap opera. We were made to feel bad because we were not perfect like our television counterparts. We were resentful that our patients did not get better as quickly as they did on telly - or at all.

I'm a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It's certainly the most miserable state to be in but it's also tremendously gratifying, really - rage feels justified.

I guess lyrically they're similar because they're talking about escaping the kind of misery that likes company. 'The Last One Alive,' for me, is very simple. It's just about alienation, really, that causes anger.

I was forced, more or less, to go to anger management. I was either going to make myself and everyone around me miserable, or I was going to realize that there's more than one person on this Earth. It definitely has made me a better person.

The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.

When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.

The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt?

Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.

You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.

"Find consolation in comparing your sadness to the misery of a tree from the environmental disasters like deforestation

Do you think there are smartphones in the afterlife? Because if not, lots of people are going to be very miserable in heaven.

The fear of the Ocean is not from the rivers flowing in it, but from its own waves. Because if they oppose, they spoil the whole map of the ocean. In the same way, man is endangered by the conspiracies of the people closer to him, who leave no stone unturned in turning his prosperity into misery.

Those miseries of life can't hide the lights of kindness that shine from within.

If you're all alone and miserable then you are definitely in a bad company.

Life is greater, way larger than any failure or misery that may come our way and so there is no reason to feel helpless.

Don't talk of Life as if its one big package of miseries - it is the very Essence within that passes through both you, and your enemies and every permissible illusion. Once you're opened to, and are awakened to your TRUE NATURE, fireworks light up your path, irrespective whether it is a "Tariqa", or a pathless one!

Alone with my wine and my misery, I was convinced that life was composed of a string of "if only's" leading from one self-inflicted bungle to the next until at some point, one's final iteration of the excuse became one's final utterance, and one expired.