Jerry Stahl

“I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop...this...fucking...feeling.”

“Rec Room! Wow!" My eyes would have glazed over if they hadn't started out that way, pre-glazed. "I've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.”

“Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.”

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

“Creativity is the opposite of TV.”

“Society has always said: Make money. Artists have said: But there's something else. Cliché City. But in Hollwood there's the Big Lie that you can have both. A lie you want to believe.”

“This is Hollywood's dirty little secret. It's not about making movies. Are you kidding? Forget that shit about "the Dream Factory." It's about manufacturing frustration.”

“We can't live together," I remember screeching. "We're married. It's too corny!”

“Our eyes kissed...”

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

“The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode.”

“It's not like I ever wanted to wake up and just be a grossly overpaid, self-loathing, can't-look-in-the-mirror-without-gagging TV writer.”

“Just because I'd kicked junk, after all, did not mean I'd kicked being a junkie. And junkies lie. It's their primary addition.”

“Opiates are, by their very nature, about forgetting. When you're in that narcotic haze, memory functions like some mutant projector, a hell-tuned Bell & Howard. As the film goes in one end, at the other end it's immediately eaten by some kind of acid, dissolving the second the events transpire.”

“This book, for me, is less an exercise in recall than exorcism.”

“You might say that success ruined me. You might say I ruined success.”

“There are stories you don't want to tell, and there are stories that scald your brainpan right down to the tongue at the mere thought of uttering. But you can't NOT. Even if you wait until your skull is nothing but a charred and smoking husk, the truth will still be in there, squirming.”

“I would, if one-armned and jonesing, doubtless have found a way to cook up a hearty spoon of Mexican tar and slam it with my toes. (I met a double amputee in San Francisco whose girlfriend slapped a bra strap around his throat and geezed him in the neck. Another triumph of the human spirit. But slap me if I get sentimental...)”

“The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less.”

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

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

“People always ask, "What's the worst thing heroin drove you to do?". I always answer, "showing up on Maury.”

“This was the history of the world. Recovery and collapse, despair and relief. The dialectic of clean and dirty. Every time is worse than the time before. The bad things come, days and nights and days and nights get so unbelievably fucked up, unbelievably fast, but in the end-- if there is an end-- everybody's best self just slogs forward, one stagger, one fall, one day, one 'what the fuck just happened?' moment of oblivion and soul-broken joy at a time. All we have to do is not die.”

“I think that a lot of people are in love with stress. It's the dirty little secret of Western civilization. People often mistake stress for fuel.... to me, stress is just another bad drug that I don't want to do.”

“Let me tell you something. Boring women get a bad rap. There's a lot to be said for boring women.”

“If you're here for four more years or four more weeks, you're here right now. I think when you're somewhere, you ought to be there. It's not about how long you stay in a place, it's about what you do while you're there, and when you go, is that place any better for your having been there?”

“I'm wearing a diaper. Right now.”

“The part of his mind that considered odds and consequences had shut down entirely, snuffed by the sheer adrenal rush of holding her, falling together into the Impala's sunken upholstery. He took her face in his hands as he kissed her, wanting to just get it right, to stamp the moment, to blunt the thunder of fear pounding in his skull as the rest of him succumbed to a sensation beyond pleasure, a kind of twisted relief that he'd macheted all his moorings, that whatever happened now would happen because he'd said 'Fuck It!' to everything that had rendered him, for more years than he could count, a soul-dead, heart-numbed misfit staggering from pill to pill just to get through the dull risk of his own existence.”

“I know it sounds lame, but I have to dig the way you think, and I have to feel you get me. My whole fucking life, I pretended I could relate to chicks so I could get into their pants. Then once I got in, all I wanted was out again.”

“To me, God is like this happy bus driver.”

“I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney.”