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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.