Quotes from Neil Strauss

Arthur Joseph (for voice lessons, infinite wisdom, and an eye-opening Esalen retreat)

She covered her body with a feather, reached under her legs, and threw her panties into the audience. A flying herpes rag. A hipster with mutton-chop sideburns caught it. He crumpled it in his fist and thrust it into the air excitedly. His little venereal prize. A

There is a downside to casual sex: Sometimes it stops being casual. People develop a desire for something more. And when one person's expectations don't match the other person's, then whoever holds the highest expectations suffers. There is no such thing as cheap sex. It always comes with a price. I

The great thing about real life is that it will always surprise you. Nothing ever turns out the way you expect. I suppose that's why I write nonfiction. If this were a movie, the organization would already have traced my number, bugged my phone, and kidnapped my brother. Instead I was being transferred to the publicist and media relations executive for a death cult.

If she eats garlic during dinner, does it mean she isn't planning on kissing me?";

So how do you feel about it?" "I'm not upset, but my mom was crying and it's the first time I've ever seen her cry. Dad always wanted whiskey poured on his grave, so my brother said, 'I just hope he doesn't mind me filtering it through my bladder first.'" Mystery

Marko looked as if he could use a makeover himself. A big-boned six foot three, he was much stockier than most Serbians, with an olive complexion and the out-of-proportion head of a Peanuts character. He wore an overcoat that was one size too big, a thick gray Brooks Brothers sweater with flecks of white, and a cream-colored turtleneck that actually made him look like a turtle. Marko

They say that a man is as faithful as his options, and in this moment I know it to be true. So I switched the phone off. It's too much. Even Jesus only had three temptations.

that wanting to give up "anything" for someone else's happiness is a dysfunctional symptom of love addiction and codependence.

marriage was an obsolete institution.

And I already like Nicole enough to hope she'll consider being my consensually nonmonogamous polyamorous pluralistic multiple-relating primary partner.

Project Hollywood was bringing me out of my solipsistic shell.

The first: No good deed goes unpunished. (A phrase, ironically, that was coined by a woman, Clare Boothe Luce.) The

Butting heads with someone never works," his mom said. "I always say that you don't have to do the direct approach. You can just go around because there's always a back way." "Now I know where he got Mystery Method from." In three sentences, his mother had unintentionally summarized Mystery's entire approach to meeting women: the indirect method.

He was the only person I could talk to who wasn't afraid to take chances and make changes to pursue his dreams. Everyone else I knew always said, "Later"; Mystery said, "Now," and that was an intoxicating word to me-because later, every time I'd ever heard it, translated as never.

But I can't seem to evolve to the next state of being because I spend far too much time thinking about women.

Some people say that time cures all wounds, but I think that time is the wound.

Everyone likes to look for aliens, but I think we are the aliens. We're the descendants of the troublemakers on other planets. Just like Australia was a prison to England, where they sent all their criminals and so on, it's the same thing on Earth. This is where they dropped us off. We're the insane fucking people from somewhere else, just a bunch of trash.

It's a type of frame control," Tyler Durden replied. A frame is an NLP term: It is the perspective through which one sees the world. Whoever's frame—or subjective reality—is the strongest tends to dominate an interaction. "Style has all these really subtle ways of keeping control of the frame and getting people to qualify themselves to him. He makes sure that the focus is always on him. I'm writing a post about it." "That's

FIRST PROBLEM FOR ALL OF US, MEN AND WOMEN, IS NOT TO LEARN BUT TO UNLEARN.

He looked like a big baby goose with acne. This

I felt the heat of her body and was reminded of how much I love human contact. Pets like to be petted. It isn't sexual when a dog or cat begs for physical affection. People are the same way: we need touch. But we're so sexually screwed up and obsessed that we get nervous and uncomfortable when another person touches us.

The great lie of modern dating is that in order to sleep with a woman, a man must pretend initially as if he doesn't want to.

But the truth is that the fantasy is often better than the reality. I had just learned that lesson. Most men eventually learn that lesson. Mystery may have thought he wanted to live with two girls who love each other as much as they love him, but chances are they'd get on his nerves, team up against him, and eventually make him just as miserable as he'd been with Katya.