Jerry Stahl > Quotes

“To me, God is like this happy bus driver.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“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

“I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“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, Permanent Midnight

“All of us, at some point in life, choose our cliché.”
― Jerry Stahl, Pain Killers

“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, Permanent Midnight

“I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney.”
― Jerry Stahl

“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, Permanent Midnight

“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.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“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, Permanent Midnight

“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.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“All my life I'd gone for women who were a little off.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“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.”
― Jerry Stahl, Pain Killers

“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: A Darkly Comic Noir of Murder and Twisted Love

“...with enough rock in your system, you could hear every noise in the universe.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“At 17, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes.”
― Jerry Stahl

“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

“When in doubt, though, counter with your own cool.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“There's no deodorant for desperation.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Can you understand this? Shooting dope is all about getting warm and fuzzy. Dependably so. But the Daddy-rush... Forget about it! I've never felt anything so terrifying! It's so real, even the pleasure can break your heart. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is what separates shooting smack from loving your little girl. Heroin may kill you, but it'll never break your heart. Not like a child.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“...it's not what people do, it's what they don't tell you they do. That's what hurts. That's what you think about when the television signs off and you're still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Sometimes I feel like a writer, sometimes I just feel like a snitch.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“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, Permanent Midnight

“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

“The part of his mind that considered odds and consequences had shut down entirely, snuffed by the sheer adrenal rush of holding her, falling together into the Impala's sunken upholstery. He took her face in his hands as he kissed her, wanting to just get it right, to stamp the moment, to blunt the thunder of fear pounding in his skull as the rest of him succumbed to a sensation beyond pleasure, a kind of twisted relief that he'd macheted all his moorings, that whatever happened now would happen because he'd said 'Fuck It!' to everything that had rendered him, for more years than he could count, a soul-dead, heart-numbed misfit staggering from pill to pill just to get through the dull risk of his own existence.”
― Jerry Stahl, Plainclothes Naked: A Darkly Comic Noir of Murder and Twisted Love

“Our eyes kissed...”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“It's different to miss somebody when they're still alive. When they die it's like, 'Okay, I'm sad.' You're supposed to be sad. When they just go away, when they disappear, that's a different thing.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Why am I always attracting women who still slept with stuffed animals?”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight