Jerry Stahl Quotes

If you're here for four more years or four more weeks, you're here right now. I think when you're somewhere, you ought to be there. It's not about how long you stay in a place, it's about what you do while you're there, and when you go, is that place any better for your having been there?

Jake La Botz is a creator of dark poetry and haunting song, the kind of music that gets in your bones and rides you for days, a sound and vision only those who've been to the bottom and clawed their way back up can generate. His midnight gifts evoke Hank Williams and Skip James as much as Tom Waits and Dylan. Not everybody will get this music - because not everybody is ready for the truth.

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

You may think you don't want to throw your life away for mere fleeting euphoria. But, once you get a taste, it doesn't feel so mere. From then on the planet becomes a waiting room. The rest of your life devolves to no more than the time between highs.

A waft of sweet hash drifted by, and I wanted to float after it like Wimpy levitating at the scent of a hamburger.

Heroin spread that soft blanket over everything. But once the blanket was ripped off, it took a layer of skin with it, leaving nothing but nerve ends screaming in the breeze.

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

It's not like I was an alkie or anything. Alcohol is for cleaning needles

There's no deodorant for desperation.

The traditional dictionary definition of the difference is that an alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout, come to, and apologize for it. A junkie will steal your wallet and then help you look for it. But ultimately I think all addictions boil down to just not being able to be with yourself for any long degree of time.

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

I've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.

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

If you're an asshole, you have an excuse for being an asshole because you're a junkie. But then once you give up the drugs, and you're still an asshole, that's problematic.

The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.

I don't really know how to do much else besides write.

This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.

There was a weird intimacy, sitting in a car together. Couples sat in cars. Cops and their partners. Strangers became unstrange, sharing a windshield view of the world.

All my life I'd gone for women who were a little off.

Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.

To me, God is like this happy bus driver.

I think that a lot of people are in love with stress. It's the dirty little secret of Western civilization. People often mistake stress for fuel.... to me, stress is just another bad drug that I don't want to do.

The art and act of writing - speaking just for myself - involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair.

How do you write when you're not miserable? The solution, of course, is to make yourself miserable about not writing.

I always figured I myself would never be lucky enough to die, I'd just live on and on in this increasingly dreary spiral.