You can't really compare hells. But I suppose the hell of being strung out on another person's addictive behavior is its own special thing.
I didn't really start publishing books until I was 40 because I was busy being a McDonald's employee. So there's always a sense of trying to make up for lost time.
My own theory is that people are just so desperate for somebody they can feel better than, in America. Now that everyone's going broke and working 17 jobs - if they have one at all - at least they can look at these guys behind bars and think, "At least I get to wear my own clothes to work."
I think it's just too kinda juicy and compelling to imagine people in their private lives, but then half the time people's private lives are just so much more bizarre and Ted Haggard-like than you could ever imagine. It's almost hard to write fiction anymore.
I always tell myself, when I remember the non-stop self-generated hell party that used to be my life, I wouldn't be here if I didn't go there.
I think there's a phenomenon of people who want to be around something that seems "dangerous." It makes them feel more real.
For me there was never a lot of glamor involved in being a junkie, it was about trying to hide the puke and bloodstains on my shirt.
I used to say, for me, writing was like walking a high wire, and heroin made me forget there was no net. Which is a fancy way of saying dope made me forget how shitty I felt for being on dope.
Junkies are liars. They have to be professionally.
I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.
The second time I took acid, I watched myself in the mirror for nine hours. What I realized, when I stared, was that my face looked exactly the same when I cried as when I laughed. After awhile I couldn't tell which I was doing. Relief was just pain inside out.
Half the reason I turned into a writer is you didn't have to show up anywhere. You could work naked.
At 17, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes.
Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.
Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn’t know you needed transforming.
Creativity is the opposite of TV
This is, I believe, what happens when people take their own lives. They're not killing themselves, they're killing the world. Either to spare it pain or to cause it some, depending.
