Matty Healy > Quotes

“I think about dying but I dont want to die. Not even close. In fact my problem is the complete opposite. I want to live, I want to escape. I feel trapped and bored and claustrophobic. There’s so much to see and so much to do but I somehow still find myself doing nothing at all. I’m still here in this metaphorical bubble of existence and I can’t quite figure out what the hell I’m doing or how to get out of it.”
― Matty Healy

“I think about dying, but i don't want to die. Not even close. In fact, my problem is the complete opposite. I want to live, I want to escape. I feel trapped and bored and claustrophobic. There's so much to see and so much to do but I somehow still find myself doing nothing at all. I'm still here, in this metaphorical bubble of existence and I can't quite figure out what the hell I'm doing or how to get out of it.”
― Matty Healy

“Who's to say tomorrow won't be the best day of your life?”
― Matty Healy

“...the hopelessly romantic notion that two people can meet and instantly fall in love, an escape story where love is the highest law and conquers all against the odds. Characters like Bonnie and Clyde always appealed to me as a teenager - couples so intoxicated with one another that they fear nothing in the pursuit of the realization of each other, actions fueled by blind unconditional love.”
― Matty Healy

“The idea of losing something is toying with the idea of having it in the first place, so I suppose I’ll be alright.”
― Matty Healy

“After reading someone you love, wait at least an hour before starting to write”
― Matty Healy

“Reality is chaos, and we’ve created an algorithm that keeps us informed of as much of that chaos as possible, from the second we wake up to the second we go to bed, and then we wonder why we’re anxious.”
― Matty Healy

“My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen.”
― Matty Healy

“I read a lot, too, though I can’t figure out if I’m reading all these books because I want to be clever enough to deal with everything, or whether I’m reading them for enjoyment.”
― Matty Healy

“God bless Taylor Swift… But I couldn’t live that life. I couldn’t be that famous.”
― Matty Healy

“I’m always talking about the internet and what’s happening now, so cancel culture is something I’m interested in as a phenomenon, but I don’t want it to come across like I’m butt-hurt about it because, honestly, I don’t really care. Because what is cancelling? People start a social media account and once they get more than 300 followers they can’t see their audience as anything but an audience, something to be performed to — which is why you get the weird thing of your mate who works in a brewery talking on Facebook like he’s talking to a packed convention centre. When you’re performing to an audience, the only human inclination is to be the benevolent protagonist. You’d never assume the role of the antagonist — that’s why trolls exist with anonymity. People who actually put themselves out there, online, their role is to be the good guy. We’re not aware of the solipsism of this behaviour because we’re all doing it. So once a week, culture generates a baddie so all the good guys can go: ‘Look how good I am in opposition to how bad he is.’ And the reason we forget about whatever morally [dubious] thing that person has done a week later is because we don’t care. It’s all literally a performance. There’s a purposeful removal of context in order to seem virtuous that happens so constantly that people can’t even be arsed.”
― Matty Healy

“You remember your pre-internet brain, and you remember doing those things, but you don’t really remember how it felt. You don’t really remember how time felt. There’s that guy who wrote that book, I can’t remember what it’s called, fuckin’ genius guy. But he’s saying that the world has always been informed by people who read books, and not necessarily academically, but the concept of a narrative is very important to people’s lives. Those people grew up with not necessarily a sense of purpose, but a sense that your life is leading somewhere. That’s the way I relate to my music, because I see The 1975 as this story. But as we go into the future, the world is gonna start being informed by people who didn’t grow up with that narrative — who grew up with more of a sense of immediacy. And we start to feel more like a unit amongst other units, and everything becomes a lot more compartmentalized. So when we talk about Twitter, we know that we were happy before, but we can’t remember how it felt, so we won’t take the risk to leave it. The generation after us now, they don’t have that weird nostalgia or sense that something’s wrong: ‘I didn’t used to do this. I didn’t used to need this.”
― Matty Healy

“The problem with Gen Z is that they’ve set up this moral standard that they can’t even live up to! They’re starting to realise that as they’re getting into their mid-20s. When you’re an idealistic 18 or 19-year-old, sure! But you will make mistakes, you will hurt people, you will do things that some people will perceive as rotten. It’s this standard that I’m trying to break down. I’m just a bloke, so are you. No one’s fooling anybody.”
― Matty Healy

“We need to be looking after young men a bit better before we start demonising them.”
― Matty Healy

“All the commas in my life used to be drugs or cigarettes — get in the car have a cig, get out of the car have a cig, after dinner have a cig, before food have a cig, have a chat to you have a cig. And you can start doing that with drugs as well.”
― Matty Healy

“I’m not going to be specific, but I had some early sexual experiences that, as I got older, were really, really difficult to deal with. It wasn’t to do with anything that happened in my family or at home, it was these… different things that happened. So my mental health had come through the negotiation of sex as a teenager and a young man, and romantic relationships.”
― Matty Healy

“I’m buying a lot of books and then putting them in a nice order and then saying, I’m going to read that tomorrow. And then I’m going to read that one after it.”
― Matty Healy

“I genuinely believe the empowerment of young women is the most important thing in the world and will lead to the destruction of injustice.”
― Matty Healy

“Does babygirl mean camp?”
― Matty Healy

“I’ve got too much history of thinking about how you present yourself. I think that I get known for being a motormouth, but when introspection is provoked, I can’t help but make it a bit of therapy.”
― Matty Healy

“When I was 17, all the cultural ideas that I was sold were about the future. Being 17 now must be terrifying. You must look at the state of the economy and the world and you don’t know if there’s going to be a future. If I was 17 now and I was having to deal with the things that young people are expected to deal with — you need to be informed on racial issues, how economies work, all this stuff … When I was 17, I was getting stoned, and there was no one shouting at me on the internet that I wasn’t doing my part. It felt like the apocalypse anyway, because of some girl or a lack of weed or something like that. It wasn’t like trying to understand these huge ideas and being expected to have this pre-signed-off opinion on anything.”
― Matty Healy

“When text messaging first came about, it was still a one-to-one negotiation: I propose an idea or something to you, you exchange back to me. When you get to 2010/2011, this new model of communication that exists is that you put something out there into the world and then you wait for a reaction. Now, if you look at the depression rates amongst young men, the correlation between these two things is very measurably concise, and amongst young women it’s insane. I’m not necessarily an empiricist, I believe in nuance and subtext and context, but I think that if there’s evidence like that, I mean — I’m sure we could really map depression on to the sale of avocados, too — but I do feel like that’s got something to do with it and it kind of freaks me out.”
― Matty Healy

“You see, I’d created this character for myself. This self-deprecating Pied Piper of a young guy. Then I became that.”
― Matty Healy

“The maintenance of my life, my relationship with my mum, my brother, all my close relationships, are mediated by how much Wi-Fi I have. If you got rid of everybody’s phones, everybody’s relationships would deteriorate. There’s this idea that we look down on any kind of discourse that we have online, that it’s this inauthentic version of communication, when actually it’s the primary driver of our relationships.”
― Matty Healy