Quotes from Mark Leyner

Although we may deplore the film's scatological language, sexual explicitness and gratuitous gore as seemingly designed only to shock, in the manner of an angry, attention-craving child, we must remember that this movie was actually made by an angry, attention-craving child.

If I were asked to give a commencement speech (which I'll never be), I'd say basically: They're all gonna laugh at you. Life is pretty much like Carrie's prom. So ... stay secret.

But that's what nonfiction is, people. Shitty feelings and encounters with death.

We're so far from having any control over what happens to us, it's not even funny. Well, that's not true, actually. It is funny.

i am estranged from most men. my american express card says simply: multicellular animal with specialized digestive cavities -- requires corrective glasses

Are the Gods real or is Ike Karton just crazy? And the answer is: Yes.

fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.

studies have failed to find any substantial evidence proving a relationship between sugar consumption and hyperactivity.

We're all adults here—we all know the score. We know what they do to people like me and my mom, to paradoxical hybrids of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naïveté. We know what happens to unreconstructed surrealist militants. Tortured. Marked for assassination. Imagine what awaits me out there.

There is something unspeakably consoling in one's own smile. In that reflection, you can discern the face of yourself as a child and the face of yourself as a corpse. And in this moment, all the fundamental antinomies are reconciled--the sacred and the profane, the analyst and the analysand, the celebrated success and the abject failure. The pilot and the passenger. Writer and reader. Fiction and nonfiction. Past and present. And the mind that abides and the mind that is gone.

I really think this kind of consensual cannibalism is such a perfect analogue for the reciprocal relationship between writer and reader, and especially between writers and readers of autobiography. The reader of an autobiography consumes the life of the author, and the author, in turn, consumes the life of the reader, that portion of it surrendered to reading, or listening to, the autobiography.

I stink, therefore I think.

And I still believe that there are two basic kinds of people--people who cultivate the narcissistic delusion of being watched at all times through the viewfinder of a camera, and people who cultivate the paranoid delusion of being watched at all times through the high-powered optics of a sniper's rifle, and I think I fall--and have always fallen--into this latter category.

Any asshole with a Masters in Social Work can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can't mail meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blond.

I remember how people used to bitch about those crazy tapes of the Beatles at Shea Stadium, about how you couldn't hear the music, that all you could hear was the screaming, the screaming of all those thousands of girls. But I've always loved that din especially—that vast, unrelenting din of screaming girls that almost completely overwhelms the sad, beautiful voices of John and Paul. That's great. That whole thing for me is the real music.