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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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Jerry Stahl
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: September 28
Autobiographer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Herbert W. Day
Enough
Spiral
Always
Spirals
Never
Dreary
Would
Figured
Increasingly
Lucky
Dies
Live

More quotes by Jerry Stahl

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All of us, at some point in life, choose our cliché.
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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.
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Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.
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I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.
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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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Creativity is the opposite of TV
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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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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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I've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Junkies are liars. They have to be professionally.
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.
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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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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
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There's no deodorant for desperation.
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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To me, God is like this happy bus driver.
Jerry Stahl