Quotes from Mark Leyner

The hours you spent reading this really do represent an irrevocable loss for you. You can never get that time back. That part of your life is gone forever. I'm profoundly grateful to you for that.

There are enigmas that we can gnaw on throughout our lives from which we derive sustenance, some kind of spiritual nourishment...I'm thinking of certain kinds of riddles and koans and philosophical conundrums, things like that...But there are also enigmas that, throughout our lives, gnaw on us.

Mütter Museum

Why do you think I'm obsessed with this idea of giving the world an alphabet-soup enema?' (This was our code language for wanting to be a writer.) After a very long, Viennese pause, he said, 'Why do you think you are?' And I said, 'I don't know...Prolonged exposure to radiation from violent events in deep space?

I dont walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. Its worse than bleak, its apocalyptic.

When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.

"Et Tu, Babe" was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing, it's my whole life.

The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.

I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.

It's in great joy that we grasp truth.

I'm fascinated with video games, though I can't really play them. It's definitely an art form that intrigues me to no end, though.

My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.

My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.

My idea with my work is always to fashion something that's impossible to transpose into any other media.

I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

Yo! You're my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I'd have asked for it, Motherfucker!

Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it's upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order.

You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it's no one's business that you've shrunk your parents and keep them in a terranium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that's a diary you're producing from your cleavage, I'm leaving.

I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.

Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked, rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical, monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic, blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the /impudence!/ We have /nothing/ in this life of suffocating obligation but our own motherfucking impudence! For God's sake, give us this day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!!

We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence!

On our last mission - our "final exam" - we were airlifted to a remote region, and we parachuted directly into a hostile enclave. We had to subdue the enemy using hand-to-hand tactics like tae kwon do and pugil sticks, cut their hair in styles appropriate to their particular face shapes, and give them perms.

So where does the name Adam's apple come from? Most people say that it is from the notion that this bump was caused by the forbidden fruit getting stuck in the throat of Adam in the Garden of Eden. There is a problem with this theory because some Hebrew scholars believe that the forbidden fruit was the pomegranate. The Koran claims that the forbidden fruit was a banana. So take your pick---Adam's apple, Adam's pomegranate, Adam's banana. Eve clearly chewed before swallowing.