Top 40 Jerry Stahl Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m wearing a diaper. Right now.”

— Jerry Stahl

2. “You need an entire drama to construct your life around to avoid living it.”

— Jerry Stahl

3. “There’s no deodorant for desperation.”

— Jerry Stahl

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “In my family, misery didn’t just love company, it wanted hostages.”

— Jerry Stahl

8. “The art and act of writing – speaking just for myself – involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair.”

— Jerry Stahl

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

— Jerry Stahl

10. “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

11. “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

12. “To me, God is like this happy bus driver.”

— Jerry Stahl

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Junkies are liars. They have to be professionally.”

— Jerry Stahl

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Mom lived in 709. Five doors down from 714, the number they stamped on Quaaludes.”

— Jerry Stahl

20. “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

21. “Sometimes I think life’s nothin’ but sittin’ around watchin’ pretty go bad.”

— Jerry Stahl

22. “I’ve always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.”

— Jerry Stahl

23. “Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn’t know you needed transforming.”

— Jerry Stahl

24. “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

25. “It’s not like I was an alkie or anything. Alcohol is for cleaning needles.”

— Jerry Stahl

26. “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

27. “More and more, I’d been having this feelings of zeroness. Of HERE-I-AM-AND-IT-JUST-DOESN’T-MATTER.”

— Jerry Stahl

28. “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

29. “All my life I’d gone for women who were a little off.”

— Jerry Stahl

30. “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

31. “Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.”

— Jerry Stahl

32. “Not doing something crude right off is about as close as a guy like me ever gets to class.”

— Jerry Stahl

33. “Creativity is the opposite of TV.”

— Jerry Stahl

34. “I don’t really know how to do much else besides write.”

— Jerry Stahl

35. “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

36. “Just because I’d kicked junk, after all, did not mean I’d kicked being a junkie. And junkies lie. It’s their primary addition.”

— Jerry Stahl

37. “How do you write when you’re not miserable? The solution, of course, is to make yourself miserable about not writing.”

— Jerry Stahl

38. “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

39. “I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.”

— Jerry Stahl

40. “Half the reason I turned into a writer is you didn’t have to show up anywhere. You could work naked.”

— Jerry Stahl

41. “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

42. “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