“Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.”

“I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.”

“I have that hypocrisy of a parent in that I'm like,'Come on, you've got to toughen up at the same time let me take care of that for you.”

“The worst gift I was given is when I got out of rehab that Christmas; a bottle of wine. It was delicious.”

“This book could scare them. The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm - I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it”

“Gillette--The best a man can get."I stared at the screen. What happened to me? I was meant to be one of those guys, vigorous and athletic and successful and, most of all, American. I was going to walk on the moon, be a movie star or a rock got or a comedian. I was going to have an amazing life and kids with Helen and die like Chaplin a thousand years from now in my Beverly Hills mansion surrounded by my adoring family, with the grieving world media standing by. Instead, I was just another show-business mediocrity. A drunk who shat his pants and ran for help. My life had been careless and selfish. Pleasure in the moment was my only thought, my solitary motivation. I had disappointed whoever had been foolish enough to love me, and left them scarred. I was a very long way from being the best a man can get.”

“School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able, I read, alone. Under the covers with a flashlight or in my corner of the attic—I sought solace in books. It was from books that I started to get an inkling of the kinds of assholes I was dealing with. I found allies too, in books, characters my age who were going through or had triumphed against the same bullshit.”