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.

There's no deodorant for desperation.

Creativity is the opposite of TV

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

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

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.

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