I always figured I myself would never be lucky enough to die, I'd just live on and on in this increasingly dreary spiral.

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've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.

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

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.

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