The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

Through the healing process of time-and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases-most people survive depression which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.