Quotes from Jerry Stahl

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

When life becomes sub-human, sub-humans come alive.

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.

She knew the secret of my creepiness.

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.

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.

Maybe the reason you can never go home again is that, once you're back, you can never leave...

Mom lived in 709. Five doors down from 714, the number they stamped on Quaaludes.

It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom. —Edgar Allan Poe

Back before the internet, libraries were great places to speed; your personal nook in the old magazine racks, where you'd spend hours combing microfilm for references to amphetamines. Taylor Mead, On Amphetamine and In Europe: Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth, Volume Three (Boss Books, 1968, 251 Pages).

Just wanting Nora- wanting something that wasn't a drug- was such a novelty, such a world-changingly unlikely circumstance, I was afraid to breathe for fear it would all turn out to be some near-death hallucination.

Did you ever meet someone who either had no sense of humor or was never serious, you couldn't tell which?

Not for the first time, as the trip kicks in, I make a note to myself: Don't be an asshole.

Not until you finally try to put down the stuff do you realize, with stinging clarity, precisely why you picked it up in the first place. All life, in this freshly nerve-flayed state, boils down to a choice of hells. The hell of being fucked-up on drugs or the hell of being fucked-up without them.

Did I get my picture in the yearbook under "Most Likely to Commit Suicide"?

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.

My life - and this hit so hard I nearly toppled over - my life was Apollo 13! Launched with high expectations and pathetically crashed.

The obvious question: Was it better to die now or go on living ashamed of the fact that you were still alive? Why wasn't that on the SATs? Compare and constrast.

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

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

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.

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

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

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