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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

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Jerry Stahl
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: September 28
Autobiographer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Herbert W. Day
People
Either
Causes
Pain
Lives
Spare
Happens
Depending
Take
Spares
Believe
Killing
World
Cause

More quotes by Jerry Stahl

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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
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Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.
Jerry Stahl
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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
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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
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The traditional dictionary definition of the difference is that an alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout, come to, and apologize for it. A junkie will steal your wallet and then help you look for it. But ultimately I think all addictions boil down to just not being able to be with yourself for any long degree of time.
Jerry Stahl
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There's no deodorant for desperation.
Jerry Stahl
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Creativity is the opposite of TV
Jerry Stahl
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I've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.
Jerry Stahl
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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
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I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.
Jerry Stahl
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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
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Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn’t know you needed transforming.
Jerry Stahl
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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
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At 17, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes.
Jerry Stahl
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All of us, at some point in life, choose our cliché.
Jerry Stahl
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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
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The art and act of writing - speaking just for myself - involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair.
Jerry Stahl
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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
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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
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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