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.

If you're an asshole, you have an excuse for being an asshole because you're a junkie. But then once you give up the drugs, and you're still an asshole, that's problematic.

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.

All of us, at some point in life, choose our cliché.

The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.

I need - and occasionally love - to write for the same reasons I always did: hard as writing is, it's generally easier than life.

I think there's a phenomenon of people who want to be around something that seems "dangerous." It makes them feel more real.