The reason I want to write about drugs is that I don’t believe anyone has done a proper job of it. That it has been tried over and over and that there is already so much writing devoted to the topic doesn’t deter me. I also think I’m willing to be more honest than most other writers have been, and not ornament the language with psychedelic verbs or

William Eggleston once said that his entire body of work was an attempt to write a novel. I think my entire body of work is a suicide note.

One handsome man in a galaxy of authentication. Not threatening, yet not unthreatening.

What I love about drug addicts, one of many things, is that they don’t care about the news. News is an abstraction.

Novels, suicide notes and memoirs all have one thing in common: they’re all fictions. Novels, obviously. Memoirs, while promising the truth of a life, are still inherently fictional by virtue of what’s excluded and what’s amplified. Memoirs are the manipulative presentation of one’s life for public consumption. The mundane and the embarrassing are

The door opened and a woman in her late forties came out. She had permed hair, a linen jacket, printed skirt; her eyes were puffy and swollen from crying. So, it’s one of these offices, I thought. An office without a secondary exit. I liked secondary exits. The suffering needn’t meet the suffering in the anteroom of suffering.

The things I’ve done for sex and drugs: unspeakable. The things sex and drugs have done for me: my entire output. And enough material to last me another lifetime as an artist.

The minute you get into your dope is the minute you stop progressing in the progressive world. No need for new clothes, new music, new hair styles. Drugs are beautiful in the way they create a singularly focused mind.

My small group of friends were all similarly anti-social, autodidactic, talented, and at war with the permanence of their bodies. It was a good time.