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

I don't really know how to do much else besides write.

I think that a lot of people are in love with stress. It's the dirty little secret of Western civilization. People often mistake stress for fuel.... to me, stress is just another bad drug that I don't want to do.

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

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.

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.