"I had quite a happy childhood until I was six or seven, after that it was horrendous. At the age of eight I became very isolated - we had a lot of family problems at that time - and that tends to orchestrate you life. I had a foul adolescence and a foul teenage existence. Except you couldn't really call it an existence. I just sort of sccraped through, escaping into films and books until The Smiths happened and allowed me to live again."
–Nov. 1983

"Before I joined the group I was in a seious medical condition."
–May 1983

"I read persistently. I swam in books as a child, and at some point it becomes quite ruinous. It gets to the point where you can't answer the door without being heavily analytical about it. But ultimately I think they've proved to be positive weapons for me now. I feel that if I han't been through that very swamped period, I perhaps couldn't deal with this whole new situation, or The Smiths would be just another group, just hovering along and disappearing quickly. I really and sincerely believe that."
–Feb. 1984

"It seemed suddenly that the years were passing, and I was peering out from behind the bedroom curtains. It was the kind of quite dangerous isolation that's totally unhealthy. It was like a volunteered redundancy, in a way. Most of the teenagers that surrounded me, and the things that pleased them and interested them, well, they bored me stiff. It was like saying, 'Yes, I see that this is what all teenagers are supposed to do, but I don't want any part of this kind of drudgery.'"
–March 1984

"I lived a hopelessly isolated life. I literally never, ever met people. I wouldn't set foot outside of the house for three weeks at a run."
–June 1984

"The power of the written word really stung me, and I was also entirely immersed in popular music."
–June 1984

"The realisation that suicide was quite appealing and attractive happened when I was eight."
–1984

"I was never young. Periods where, by law, you were meant to be totally reckless, I was absurdly, cripplingly, serious. I could never relax, I never accpeted my sexuality. This idea of fun: cars, girls, Saturday night, bottle of wine . . . to me, those things are morbid. I was always attracted to people with the same problems as me. It doesn't help when most of them are dead!"
–1984

"As achild I went to this Catholic school: they fed us this idea of heaven and living for ever and ever and ever. It used to petrify me. Can you imagine living this life without end? It's horrific.
–1984

"I decided that I was going to be a pop star at a very early age, but I wasn't too sure about my capabilities. I sang in the school choir, but that doesn't really count."
–Sept. 1984

"I often recount tales of total morbidity, but I can't remember the old rolling in the hay bit, out in the countryside sketching horses or whatever. I can simply remember being in very dark streets, penniless."
–Nov. 1984

"I never wanted to get off PE - it was the only intellectual subject in school. But I did used to get off all the other subjects. I just used to be constantly ill- general manic depression, mainly. I didn't need notes or anything. They just had to take one look at me and that was enough."
–May 1984

"I never had an adolescence. I went straight from six to 46. Quite depressing, really. I missed out on all those things like discos at Christmas. I suppose I've now regressed, but I wouldn't call it a second childhood, because it's my first."
–May 1984

"I was never bullied at school, I must admit. I was never picked on, never pushed around. It's not very interesting, is it?"
–May 1984

"I always wanted to be a librarian. To me that seemed like the perfect life: solitude; absolute silence; tall, dark libraries. But then they started to become very modern, you know, these little prefabs, and they had no romance whatsoever. So suddenly the idea had no fascination for me."
–May 1984

"The past is so very important. I don't like it when people say, let's leave the past and go ahead, because a lot of the future isn't that attractive."
–June 1985

"Because I had such an intense view about taking one's life, I imagined that this must be my calling, sucide, nothing more spectacular or interesting. I felt that people who eventually took their own lives were not only aware that they would do so in the last hours or weeks or months of their life. They had always been aware of it. They had resigned themselves to suicide many years before they actually did it. In a sense, I had."
–April 1988