When you're mired in the depths of depression, it's impossible to believe that anything can get better, but it can and it will. Seek out low-cost or free counseling. Get help and support from your community and stick with it until you can afford some fancy private shrink. Do anything. Join a church group if you have to. It doesn't have to be about religion, it's about not feeling alone. Also, do not be afraid to go to the emergency room. I've been there.

Happy to me is not what I thought happy was. Happy is actually better, because it includes room for sadness. A definition of success must leave room for failure, because it's part of it.

It's time to hand back responsibility for being an adult to everyone in the situation. You're not helping anybody by staying in a romantic relationship that isn't good for you or staying in a work relationship that sucks or staying in a friendship where you hate the other person. That's not helping anyone.

When you're disappointed romantically - when people evolve or they move on, when somebody doesn't love you in the same way anymore or you don't love somebody in the same way - it's devastating. Just because you leave a relationship doesn't mean that you don't love that person. It doesn't mean that you don't miss that person terribly.

If you buy my book at Walmart, I don't want you to read it. I want you to set it on fire. Because that's what you just did with your money. When you buy a book through an indie-store, you put some money into an independent store and owner in your community. You've put some money into someone's life and someone's livelihood, into keeping the lights on, into helping them be alive. That's a great thing.

The world will not give you an endowment for your finger-painting. Your finger-painting may be marvelous, but our government and society do not value art adequately. We should fulminate against that and seek to change it, but in the meantime you have to make choices. If you're an artist who likes to have a steady income for yourself, for your children, for your partner, to help you engage in elder care as you take care of your parents or grandparents, that's a good thing.

I think that if you want help from somebody, you ask. You ask not expecting anyone to give it to you, unless it is a friend or a loved one with whom you should have those expectations, because friends should help friends. Even so, when I ask friends for blurbs or for endorsements or instructions, I always leave room for the fact that they're probably busy and have a million more things to do in their day than give me Ryan Gosling's phone number. Which I've never asked for, just by way of casual example.