There was a time when I was 19 when I really, really, really thought I was going crazy. I was exhausted and going through a terrible depression.

If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.

So people have been hurting and I understand that. And it doesn't give them comfort or solace for me to tell them, you know, but for me, we would be in a worldwide depression.

In the Depression we had to divert corn acreage.

Depression, as far as I'm concerned, is just a waste of time.

Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.

But through world wars and a Great Depression, through painful social upheaval and a Cold War, and now through the attacks of September 11, 2001, our Nation has indeed survived.

Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.

I can do comedy, so people want me to do that, but the other side of comedy is depression. Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don't realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

But with the slow menace of a glacier, depression came on. No one had any measure of its progress; no one had any plan for stopping it. Everyone tried to get out of its way.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

I imagine there's a market for total depression. I grew up on George Jones and that really dark stuff.

I didn't know my mother had it. I think a lot of women don't know their mothers had it; that's the sad thing about depression. You know, you don't function anymore. You shut down. You feel like you are in a void.

I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.