Jerry Stahl Quotes

A waft of sweet hash drifted by, and I wanted to float after it like Wimpy levitating at the scent of a hamburger.

I need - and occasionally love - to write for the same reasons I always did: hard as writing is, it's generally easier than life.

All of us, at some point in life, choose our cliché.

It's not like I was an alkie or anything. Alcohol is for cleaning needles

I don't really know how to do much else besides write.

I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.

To me, God is like this happy bus driver.

Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn’t know you needed transforming.

I always tell myself, when I remember the non-stop self-generated hell party that used to be my life, I wouldn't be here if I didn't go there.

I didn't really start publishing books until I was 40 because I was busy being a McDonald's employee. So there's always a sense of trying to make up for lost time.

You can't really compare hells. But I suppose the hell of being strung out on another person's addictive behavior is its own special thing.

For me there was never a lot of glamor involved in being a junkie, it was about trying to hide the puke and bloodstains on my shirt.

I always figured I myself would never be lucky enough to die, I'd just live on and on in this increasingly dreary spiral.

There's no deodorant for desperation.

At 17, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes.

Creativity is the opposite of TV

This is, I believe, what happens when people take their own lives. They're not killing themselves, they're killing the world. Either to spare it pain or to cause it some, depending.

I think there's a phenomenon of people who want to be around something that seems "dangerous." It makes them feel more real.

Junkies are liars. They have to be professionally.

How do you write when you're not miserable? The solution, of course, is to make yourself miserable about not writing.

Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.

All my life I'd gone for women who were a little off.

There was a weird intimacy, sitting in a car together. Couples sat in cars. Cops and their partners. Strangers became unstrange, sharing a windshield view of the world.

This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.

You need an entire drama to construct your life around to avoid living it.

I've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.

In my family, misery didn't just love company, it wanted hostages.

Happiness, to me, was no different than Mom's paprikalaced domino bars: something that looked sweet until you took a bite, and then made you want to vomit.