Quotes from Jerry Stahl

SOAPY You know, feisty women never get boring. JOEL Let me tell you something. Boring women get a bad rap. There's a lot to be said for boring women.

Half the reason I turned into a writer is you didn't have to show up anywhere. You could work naked.

A tiny butter knife slices more skin off my heart every time I think about her.

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.

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.

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.

More and more, I'd been having this feelings of zeroness. Of HERE-I-AM-AND-IT-JUST-DOESN'T-MATTER.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There were mornings I thought drugs made me insane and mornings I thought they kept me from going that way.

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

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.

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.

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

I'm wearing a diaper. Right now.

Still... I would have hugged my mother if we were the kind of family who hugged. If touching her weren't impossible. If her subnightie waft was not so utterly, fatally repulsive. That's how much I loved her.

Sometimes I think life's nothin' but sittin' around watchin' pretty go bad.

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.

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.

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.

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.