Home > Author > Jerry Stahl
1 " To me, God is like this happy bus driver. "
― Jerry Stahl , Permanent Midnight
2 " Destroy your life; then put it back together.You'll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and – side benefit – the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and range with the people you create on the page – or run into off of it. "
― Jerry Stahl
3 " Still... I would have hugged my mother if we were the kind of family who hugged. If touching her weren't impossible. If her subnightie waft was not so utterly, fatally repulsive. That's how much I loved her. "
― Jerry Stahl , Perv - A Love Story
4 " Happiness, to me, was no different than Mom's paprikalaced domino bars: something that looked sweet until you took a bite, and then made you want to vomit. "
5 " I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high. "
6 " This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it. "
7 " I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney. "
8 " All of us, at some point in life, choose our cliché. "
― Jerry Stahl , Pain Killers
9 " I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop...this...fucking...feeling. "
10 " The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode. "
11 " Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later. "
12 " 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. "
13 " Opiates are, by their very nature, about forgetting. When you're in that narcotic haze, memory functions like some mutant projector, a hell-tuned Bell & Howard. As the film goes in one end, at the other end it's immediately eaten by some kind of acid, dissolving the second the events transpire. "
14 " I know it sounds lame, but I have to dig the way you think, and I have to feel you get me. My whole fucking life, I pretended I could relate to chicks so I could get into their pants. Then once I got in, all I wanted was out again. "
― Jerry Stahl , Plainclothes Naked
15 " The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less. "
16 " All my life I'd gone for women who were a little off. "
17 " This was the history of the world. Recovery and collapse, despair and relief. The dialectic of clean and dirty. Every time is worse than the time before. The bad things come, days and nights and days and nights get so unbelievably fucked up, unbelievably fast, but in the end-- if there is an end-- everybody's best self just slogs forward, one stagger, one fall, one day, one 'what the fuck just happened?' moment of oblivion and soul-broken joy at a time. All we have to do is not die. "
18 " At 17, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes. "
19 " When in doubt, though, counter with your own cool. "
20 " ...with enough rock in your system, you could hear every noise in the universe. "
