Top 66 Jerry Stahl Quotes
#1. How do you write when you're not miserable? The solution, of course, is to make yourself miserable about not writing.
Jerry Stahl
#2. I think there's a phenomenon of people who want to be around something that seems "dangerous." It makes them feel more real.
Jerry Stahl
#3. Let me tell you something. Boring women get a bad rap. There's a lot to be said for boring women.
Jerry Stahl
#4. I've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.
Jerry Stahl
#5. In my family, misery didn't just love company, it wanted hostages.
Jerry Stahl
#6. Sometimes, it's like you know what people think: You know what they're thinking, and you know it's wrong. All you want to do if change their mind, but you can't.
Jerry Stahl
#7. With enough rock in your system, you could hear every noise in the universe.
Jerry Stahl
#8. Pat Boone still didn't cover public cunt-licks in Tips for Teens, and there really wasn't anybody to ask.
Jerry Stahl
#9. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#10. Junkies are liars. They have to be professionally.
Jerry Stahl
#11. I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.
Jerry Stahl
#12. Being a junkie, when you broke it down, was nothing more than a crazed day job.
Jerry Stahl
#13. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#14. The obvious question: Was it better to die now or go on living ashamed of the fact that you were still alive? Why wasn't that on the SATs? Compare and constrast.
Jerry Stahl
#15. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#16. People always ask, "What's the worst thing heroin drove you to do?". I always answer, "showing up on Maury.
Jerry Stahl
#17. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#18. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#19. What we craved was drugs. What we had was each other.
Jerry Stahl
#20. All my life I'd gone for women who were a little off.
Jerry Stahl
#21. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#22. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#23. We can't live together," I remember screeching. "We're married. It's too corny!
Jerry Stahl
#24. It feels like I went right from pubescent to senior citizen. But what are you going to do? I'm lucky I caught myself. I might have ended up the only man in the rest home who still thought Jack Kerouac was cool.
Jerry Stahl
#25. Not until you finally try to put down the stuff do you realize, with stinging clarity, precisely why you picked it up in the first place. All life, in this freshly nerve-flayed state, boils down to a choice of hells. The hell of being fucked-up on drugs or the hell of being fucked-up without them.
Jerry Stahl
#26. You need an entire drama to construct your life around to avoid living it.
Jerry Stahl
#27. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#28. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#29. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#30. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#31. He hadn't expected anyone so pretty, and it threw him. Tina had the Faye Dunaway thing. Faye before the surgery, when her cheekbones were still as sharp as can openers and she looked like a feral gazelle.
Jerry Stahl
#32. Tina hit that tingle in the back of his head, the fuse that usually stayed damp, the one that got lit on those rare occasions when he met a woman who actually scared him. It was sort of like sex, but harder to find.
Jerry Stahl
#33. Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn't know you needed transforming.
Jerry Stahl
#34. 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
#35. I need - and occasionally love - to write for the same reasons I always did: hard as writing is, it's generally easier than life.
Jerry Stahl
#37. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#38. Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later.
Jerry Stahl
#39. Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.
Jerry Stahl
#40. This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.
Jerry Stahl
#41. It's not like I was an alkie or anything. Alcohol is for cleaning needles
Jerry Stahl
#42. My life - and this hit so hard I nearly toppled over - my life was Apollo 13! Launched with high expectations and pathetically crashed.
Jerry Stahl
#43. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#44. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#45. 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."
Jerry Stahl
#46. At 17, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes.
Jerry Stahl
#47. Half the reason I turned into a writer is you didn't have to show up anywhere. You could work naked.
Jerry Stahl
#48. Not doing something crude right off is about as close as a guy like me ever gets to class.
Jerry Stahl
#49. Did I get my picture in the yearbook under "Most Likely to Commit Suicide"?
Jerry Stahl
#50. This book, for me, is less an exercise in recall than exorcism.
Jerry Stahl
#51. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#52. I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney.
Jerry Stahl
#53. 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
#54. It's not like I ever wanted to wake up and just be a grossly overpaid, self-loathing, can't-look-in-the-mirror-without-gagging TV writer.
Jerry Stahl
#55. The art and act of writing - speaking just for myself - involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair.
Jerry Stahl
#56. More and more, I'd been having this feelings of zeroness. Of HERE-I-AM-AND-IT-JUST-DOESN'T-MATTER.
Jerry Stahl
#57. A waft of sweet hash drifted by, and I wanted to float after it like Wimpy levitating at the scent of a hamburger.
Jerry Stahl
#58. I always figured I myself would never be lucky enough to die, I'd just live on and on in this increasingly dreary spiral.
Jerry Stahl
#59. Her skin felt smooth and firm. Her hair smelled faintly of motor oil. Her mouth tasted like coffee. She was absolutely real, and it was the sexiest combination on the planet.
Jerry Stahl
#60. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#61. This is Hollywood's dirty little secret. It's not about making movies. Are you kidding? Forget that shit about "the Dream Factory." It's about manufacturing frustration.
Jerry Stahl
#63. I don't really know how to do much else besides write.
Jerry Stahl
#64. To me, God is like this happy bus driver.
Jerry Stahl
#65. 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.
Jerry Stahl
#66. 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?
Jerry Stahl
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