Mark Leyner > Quotes

“Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it's upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order.”
― Mark Leyner

“Yo! You’re my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I’d have asked for it, Motherfucker!”
― Mark Leyner, The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.”
― Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

“You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it's no one's business that you've shrunk your parents and keep them in a terranium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that's a diary you're producing from your cleavage, I'm leaving.”
― Mark Leyner, I Smell Esther Williams

“We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence!”
― Mark Leyner, The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent
anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked,
rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical,
monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic,
blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the /impudence!/ We have
/nothing/ in this life of suffocating obligation but our
own motherfucking impudence! For God's sake, give us this
day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!!”
― Mark Leyner, The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“It's the same thing that makes all pop music so heartbreaking. Even when Miley Cyrus sings "So I put my hands up, they're playin' my song / The butterflies fly away / I'm noddin' my head like 'Yeah!' / Movin' my hips like 'Yeah!'" in her song "Party in the U.S.A." It's that chirping mirth against a backdrop of despair, that juxtaposition of blithe optimism against all the crushing brutalities and inadequacies of life. The image of an ineffably beautiful butterfly flitting by the shattered windows of a dilapidated, abandoned factory is not so poignant because it highlights the indomitable life force. To the contrary, the butterfly (and the pop song) is like a PowerPoint cursor; it's there to whet our perception of and strengthen our affinity for what's moribund, for what's always dying before our eyes. Loving the moribund is our way of signaling the dead from this shore: "We are your kinsmen...”
― Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

“Bro, we're living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world -- high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it's important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I've memorized this line from Andre Breton's magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud -- "I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." Given the state of things, that's what we need to be doing, all the time -- negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive.”
― Mark Leyner

“On our last mission - our "final exam" - we were airlifted to a remote region, and we parachuted directly into a hostile enclave. We had to subdue the enemy using hand-to-hand tactics like tae kwon do and pugil sticks, cut their hair in styles appropriate to their particular face shapes, and give them perms.”
― Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

“So where does the name Adam's apple come from? Most people say that it is from the notion that this bump was caused by the forbidden fruit getting stuck in the throat of Adam in the Garden of Eden. There is a problem with this theory because some Hebrew scholars believe that the forbidden fruit was the pomegranate. The Koran claims that the forbidden fruit was a banana. So take your pick---Adam's apple, Adam's pomegranate, Adam's banana. Eve clearly chewed before swallowing.”
― Mark Leyner, Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? More Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Whiskey Sour

“Although we may deplore the film's scatological language, sexual explicitness and gratuitous gore as seemingly designed only to shock, in the manner of an angry, attention-craving child, we must remember that this movie was actually made by an angry, attention-craving child.”
― Mark Leyner, The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“...Someone can intentionally fake blindness for some secondary gain (malingering)--a prisoner who says he can't see in order to try to avoid going directly to jail. It is not difficult to figure out when patients say they are blind but can actually see. We have a simple test that lets us determine whether the eyes are functioning. Using a rotating striped drum, we test for something called optokinetic nystagmus. as the drum spins, normal eyes will be seen moving back and forth.

If a striped rotating drum is not available, you can always use a picture of J. Lo's rear. Move it back and forth, and any normal eyes will follow.”
― Mark Leyner, Why Do Men Have Nipples?: Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini

“We're living in a world in which we're all survived, targeted, herded, and indoctrinated to an unprecedented degree. Our fallen, debased state is ghastly. Our bodies have been transformed into profit-optimized enterprise zones, our minds have been hacked and neutered, our social milieus have been completely leached of authenticity....

[...]

Bro, we're living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world -- high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to the situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it's important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I've memorized this line from Andre Breton's magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud -- "I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." Given the state of things, that's what we need to be doing all the time -- negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive.”
― Mark Leyner

“Are the Gods real or is Ike Karton just crazy? And the answer is: Yes.”
― Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

“We're so far from having any control over what happens to us, it's not even funny. Well, that's not true, actually. It is funny.”
― Mark Leyner, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit

“If I were asked to give a commencement speech (which I'll never be), I'd say basically: They're all gonna laugh at you. Life is pretty much like Carrie's prom. So ... stay secret.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“I tend to interpret that whole 'everyone's wife is a Mossad agent' thing in a more sort of metaphorical way--that people you're intimate with might be, like, 'double agents,' y'know? It's a weird kind of paranoia you get about people you love--that they might turn out to be completely different from who you think they are, that it's all been some sort of diabolically patient plot against you. I think that's a pretty normal fear you have in any serious relationship. And that's why it's such a popular part of the epic, because so many people can relate to that fear. But personally, I don't really worry about it too much.”
― Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

“i am estranged from most men. my american express card says simply: multicellular animal with specialized digestive cavities -- requires corrective glasses”
― Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

“But that's what nonfiction is, people. Shitty feelings and encounters with death.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“studies have failed to find any
substantial evidence proving a relationship between sugar consumption and hyperactivity.”
― Mark Leyner, Why Do Men Have Nipples?: Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini

“fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.”
― Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

“Any asshole with a Masters in Social Work can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can't mail meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blond.”
― Mark Leyner, The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“And I still believe that there are two basic kinds of people--people who cultivate the narcissistic delusion of being watched at all times through the viewfinder of a camera, and people who cultivate the paranoid delusion of being watched at all times through the high-powered optics of a sniper's rifle, and I think I fall--and have always fallen--into this latter category.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“There is something unspeakably consoling in one's own smile. In that reflection, you can discern the face of yourself as a child and the face of yourself as a corpse. And in this moment, all the fundamental antinomies are reconciled--the sacred and the profane, the analyst and the analysand, the celebrated success and the abject failure. The pilot and the passenger. Writer and reader. Fiction and nonfiction. Past and present. And the mind that abides and the mind that is gone.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“We're all adults here—we all know the score. We know what they do to people like me and my mom, to paradoxical hybrids of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naïveté. We know what happens to unreconstructed surrealist militants. Tortured. Marked for assassination. Imagine what awaits me out there.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“I stink, therefore I think.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“I really think this kind of consensual cannibalism is such a perfect analogue for the reciprocal relationship between writer and reader, and especially between writers and readers of autobiography. The reader of an autobiography consumes the life of the author, and the author, in turn, consumes the life of the reader, that portion of it surrendered to reading, or listening to, the autobiography.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“GABY:
Are you scared of dying?
FATHER:
I live in absolute dread of dying not so much because I fear death. I'm ready, I'm accommodated, even eager sometimes. (After all, what self-respecting anthropologist isn't intrigued by the prospect of the ultimate terra igcognita?) I dread dying because I can't bear the thought of it causing you any sadness or pain, of hurting you in some irreparable way. But that really is a supreme, preening form of narcissism, isn't it? To think that your death will constitute the most tragic event in your daughter's life, one from which she'll never, couldn't -possibly-, recover... As if all daughters don't actually recover, as if that recovery isn't just the very -way- of things.
Gaby:
How do you know I'm not the exception to the rule, though? And what if they don't -all- recover? What if it -is- something daughters can never recover from?”
― Mark Leyner, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit

“And she told me I deserved a merit badge for it ... which was such a particularly funny, particularly uncanny thing for her to have said, because when I was about eight years old and I was a Cub Scout, all the boys in our den were sitting around in the kitchen of our den mother one afternoon, and she lit a cigarette bending over the flame from the front burner of the stove, and she set her hair on fire, and I put it out—I don't remember if I just smothered it with my hands or doused it with some Sprite or what—but she stared at me with this sort of demented look of gratitude on her face (she drank) and she said, 'I'm going to recommend that you get a merit badge for this,' and sure enough I did, I actually got a merit badge for extinguishing the fire in our den mother's hair.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“A Being who's higher than we are?! LOL!”
― Mark Leyner, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit