Quotes from Mark Leyner

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity.

I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

Take all your iridescent spandex and Lycra fitness accessories to the nearest landfill and let the extraterrestrials use them as goalpost pennants in their rollerball tournaments when they excavate the ruins of our civilization.

I said I'm an exceedingly boring person ... I don't really think that. I think I'm a sort of weird composite of thrill-seeking heedlessness and crippling hyperanxiety—I mean, I've taken LSD before a root canal, but I'm equally capable of calling the police and are hospitals if my wife is even five minutes late coming home from a pedicure, so ...

inhaling the sparkling light until there was no distinction between the radiance of the air freshener and myself

A person's name is a fate-conjuring incantation.

One of the things about Ike that makes him so indisputably a hero is that he doesn't leave his own contradictions to the effete disputations of armchair scholars. He grapples with them himself, in his own lifetime.

The Imaginary Intern and I used to say, 'The mind going is the mind coming,' which we meant not only in terms of the curvature of space-time (and the cosmic boomerang effect), but also in terms of sexual jouissance.

Why would we not only believe, but become eternally beholden to some unctuous car salesman who claims to be putting the lives of his own children at risk by throwing in floor mats and a bug deflector? (I know why I would--because I'm so emotionally gullible, so desperate for tiny kindnesses in my misery.)

I also think my mom 'suffers' from something one might call Pollyanna's paranoia, an irrational suspicion that there are people out there secretly trying to do good things to you, that there are all sorts of hidden perks lurking everywhere, almost like the Easter eggs in video games...that it's possible that Raoul's might be running some sort of unpublicized hemangioblastoma-all-the-caviar-you-can-eat promotion.

If we all shift to the simulacrum, then the simulacrum, for all practical purposes, becomes the real.

If I were ever asked by some young, sensitive writer just starting out, what key lesson I've learned in life (which I'll never be), I'd probably say that there is no aperture of egress, however tiny and exquisitely sensitive, that can't be turned into an aperture of ingress.

He smoked a jade-inlaid vape made from the femur of a capybara and insisted on wearing only clothes that were Vantablack

I guess I can picture things once they're done - I just can't picture actually doing them.

post hoc ergo propter hoc…after this, therefore because of this.

A Being who's higher than we are?! LOL!

If Joan Rivers had gone to the electric chair instead of Ethel Rosenberg, this is the book she would have written.

Mind over matter doesn't matter if you're the Mad Hatter with a weak bladder who steals money from his friends and still has to sell all his soggy Depends on eBay anyway, esé!

and the inexplicable prevalence of supernumerary testicles in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.

Yes, it was late, and, yes, I was being very dented-in-the-head-mutant-hillbilly, But you... you just sat there like some shitty poem.

I found a note he'd left behind entitled 'Ciao': One just keeps saying, 'No...No...No...' Head bowed, hat in hand, A cringing, cunning little step back, With each dialectical evasion, Retreating, receding, 'no...no...no...' Until one simply disappears...

Maybe you don't really appreciate your father until he has huge tits.

So, Strand looked at me, and he said, 'You should write about all this someday.' And I said, 'You mean about all the terrible privations and wrenching traumas from my childhood?' And he said, 'Yes, it would be hilarious!' And I said, 'You mean...nonfiction?