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Jerry Stahl

Jerry Stahl (born September 28, 1953) is an American novelist and screenwriter, He is best known for the darkly comedic tale of addiction, Permanent Midnight, which was revered by critics and an ever-growing cult of devoted readers, as one of the most compelling, contemporary memoirs. A film adaptation soon followed with Ben Stiller in the lead role, which is widely considered to be Mr. Stiller’s breakthrough performance. Since their initial paring, the two have become lifelong friends and collaborators.

One of Stahl’s mentors and greatest influences, the late American Novelist, Hubert Selby, Jr. had this to say about Permanent Midnight, “Absolutely compelling... Permanent Midnight is an extraordinary accomplishment... A remarkable book that will be of great value to people who feel isolated, alienated, and overwhelmed by the circumstances of their lives.”

Jerry Stahl has worked extensively in film and television.


“When life becomes sub-human, sub-humans come alive.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Half the reason I turned into a writer is you didn't have to show up anywhere. You could work naked.”
Jerry Stahl
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“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.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Heroin spread that soft blanket over everything. But once the blanket was ripped off, it took a layer of skin with it, leaving nothing but nerve ends screaming in the breeze.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Sometimes, it's like you know what people think: You know what they're thinking, and you know it's wrong. All you want to do if change their mind, but you can't.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Pat Boone still didn't cover public cunt-licks in Tips for Teens, and there really wasn't anybody to ask.”
Jerry Stahl
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“In my family, misery didn't just love company, it wanted hostages.”
Jerry Stahl
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“If I closed my eyes, I could almost count those soft hairs on the back of her neck. One day I'd even leaned forward, pretending to drop my pencil, and inhaled her until the top of my head started to steam. A scent of butterscotch wafted off of her, and it was all I could do not to plunge my face into her shag.”
Jerry Stahl
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“As far as I could tell, life was nothing but a forced march down a mined highway. Even if you did everything you were supposed to do, sooner of later if was your turn to step on a claymore.”
Jerry Stahl
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“There were mornings I thought drugs made me insane and mornings I thought they kept me from going that way.”
Jerry Stahl
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“The second time I took acid, I watched myself in the mirror for nine hours. What I realized, when I stared, was that my face looked exactly the same when I cried as when I laughed. After awhile I couldn't tell which I was doing. Relief was just pain inside out.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Booze has a different effect when you're, like, ten. Its doesn't round out the edges so much as wash you right out of the picture.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later.”
Jerry Stahl
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“A waft of sweet hash drifted by, and I wanted to float after it like Wimpy levitating at the scent of a hamburger.”
Jerry Stahl
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“There's no deodorant for desperation.”
Jerry Stahl
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“This was, I sometimes thought, the last gift my father gave me. And the best: His death stood out as the supreme-o excuse for fucking up, for being a successful fuck-up.”
Jerry Stahl
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“...it's not what people do, it's what they don't tell you they do. That's what hurts. That's what you think about when the television signs off and you're still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
Jerry Stahl
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“I wasn't sad after my father kissed the streetcar. If anything, it was a relief. Much as I missed him, his dying gave me an excuse to feel the way I already felt. Which was the way I felt right now, under the laundry room fluorescents: hollow, pissed off, wanting to be wherever I wasn't. Until I got there. Then I wanted to be somewhere else.”
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“I have to admit, I wasn't close to my old man when he was alive. He was hardly ever home. But now that he was gone, and I was back in Pittsburgh, I thought about him all the time. I felt closer to the guy since he'd been buried than I ever did when he was walking around above ground. I realized how much I loved him.”
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“That's the thing about people you loved. They disappeared on you. I didn't know much at the ripe old age of fifteen and a half. But, for better or worse, I knew that.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Mom lived in 709. Five doors down from 714, the number they stamped on Quaaludes.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Maybe the reason you can never go home again is that, once you're back, you can never leave...”
Jerry Stahl
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“In some odd gush of patriotism, my mother had once vomited on the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, and a bust of Benjamin Franklin in a single summer, aborting our vacation and causing my father to swear off historical sites until the day he died.”
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“Women in movies from Hollywood's golden era dressed the way my mother did now. My entire childhood, she'd shown up at PTA meeting in bust-hugging sequins, the sight of which gave my father complicated facial twitches. She was flamboyant, really, in no other way. There was nothing Auntie Mame about her. Unless Auntie Mame had a penchant for public collapse.”
Jerry Stahl
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“There's two kinds of people, kid: the kind who pretend they are, and the kind who pretend they aren't. Take my advice and don't be neither.”
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“She knew the secret of my creepiness.”
Jerry Stahl
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“From diapers on, I felt like there was something not good about me, but it was invisible to everybody but my mother. And whenever she looked at me, she had to let me know that she knew. That was her mission in life.”
Jerry Stahl
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“It's different to miss somebody when they're still alive. When they die it's like, 'Okay, I'm sad.' You're supposed to be sad. When they just go away, when they disappear, that's a different thing.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Sometimes I think life's nothin' but sittin' around watchin' pretty go bad.”
Jerry Stahl
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“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.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Tina hit that tingle in the back of his head, the fuse that usually stayed damp, the one that got lit on those rare occasions when he met a woman who actually scared him. It was sort of like sex, but harder to find.”
Jerry Stahl
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“He hadn't expected anyone so pretty, and it threw him. Tina had the Faye Dunaway thing. Faye before the surgery, when her cheekbones were still as sharp as can openers and she looked like a feral gazelle.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Being a junkie, when you broke it down, was nothing more than a crazed day job.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Why am I always attracting women who still slept with stuffed animals?”
Jerry Stahl
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“Can you understand this? Shooting dope is all about getting warm and fuzzy. Dependably so. But the Daddy-rush... Forget about it! I've never felt anything so terrifying! It's so real, even the pleasure can break your heart. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is what separates shooting smack from loving your little girl. Heroin may kill you, but it'll never break your heart. Not like a child.”
Jerry Stahl
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“...with enough rock in your system, you could hear every noise in the universe.”
Jerry Stahl
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“I was too busy destroying my life to bother with a minor detail like contractual obligation. I had veins to blow. A child to ignore. Friends to rip off. An apartment I hated on sight to pay for and move into.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Still holding my breath, I worked the dull point inside and slowly, slowly drew back the stopper, plunged it back in, and exhaled. At last, my grateful spirit eased out of the fetid bag of humanity crumpled in that Japanese car, eased out and drifted overhead, until it floated high over the San Fernando Valley, far away from all these people who just didn't understand, far away and high above the awful circumstance of what now passed for my life.”
Jerry Stahl
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“What we craved was drugs. What we had was each other.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Her skin felt smooth and firm. Her hair smelled faintly of motor oil. Her mouth tasted like coffee. She was absolutely real, and it was the sexiest combination on the planet.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Not doing something crude right off is about as close as a guy like me ever gets to class.”
Jerry Stahl
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“This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.”
Jerry Stahl
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“I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Mostly what I remember is the way things looked sometimes after I'd push down the plunger, sometimes when I got so high so fast I couldn't even take the needle out of my arm. I just sat back, head lolling on my shoulders like a balloon on a string, and everything, walls, carpet, couch cushion, my own hands, broke down to swirling molecules, reassembled as a million other things, and danced before my eyes before arranging themselves once more as reality. The endless cycle, that dance of molecules and their return to something solid, left me as drained as if I'd flown around the sun with veins for wings.”
Jerry Stahl
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“When in doubt, though, counter with your own cool.”
Jerry Stahl
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“You may think you don't want to throw your life away for mere fleeting euphoria. But, once you get a taste, it doesn't feel so mere. From then on the planet becomes a waiting room. The rest of your life devolves to no more than the time between highs.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Sometimes I feel like a writer, sometimes I just feel like a snitch.”
Jerry Stahl
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“It's as if there's a landscape - we'll call it childhood - which exists in our mind. It's completely familiar. Unspeakably familiar. Until in the middle of the night, when the sky is blackest, lightning cracks through the firmament. And in that crush of sound, amid the madness and the blinding flash, you see your world: home, trees, rooftops, your own hand, in an entirely new way. Illumined by fire. Flashed for half a second and then gone. And it's that image, that savage, rip-through-the-curtain vision, that lingers. Not the reality you see every day. Not the world you walk around in. No, it's that spookhouse glimpse, the scorching peek through the blackness, that stays in the brain.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Not until I stopped doing drugs altogether did I feel like a man. Not until I walked out of that fire did I have any idea what the word even meant.”
Jerry Stahl
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“Everything about my mother was a source of prepubescent agony. On the low end of the Mortification Scale there was her name: Floncey.”
Jerry Stahl
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