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

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.

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

The art and act of writing - speaking just for myself - involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair.

A waft of sweet hash drifted by, and I wanted to float after it like Wimpy levitating at the scent of a hamburger.

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.

This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.