Stahl Quotes & Sayings

Get the very best tools to serve your people, not just lots of tools. — John Stahl-Wert

This is Hollywood's dirty little secret. It's not about making movies. Are you kidding? Forget that shit about "the Dream Factory." It's about manufacturing frustration. — Jerry Stahl

I wanted her and only her.
I wanted to be a part of her storm.
I wanted to feel my pulse against hers.
I wanted the bitter on her sweet tongue.
I wanted the sadness in her sweet syrup eyes.
I wanted the silence in her screaming mind and the enigma that is really quite simple- a complicated happiness. I wasn't willing to let go. I was falling completely, forever, into solid fucking love that was swimming through my veins.
I wanted to be the breath in her mouth and the rhythm in her chest that would beat only for me. — Shey Stahl

I love live performance, but I am excited to try my hand at whatever comes my way. — Michael Stahl-David

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

A Serving Leader who creates a powerful churn of productivity needs a team that can put itself at the service of others. — John Stahl-Wert

There's no deodorant for desperation. — Jerry Stahl

Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn't know you needed transforming. — Jerry Stahl

My life - and this hit so hard I nearly toppled over - my life was Apollo 13! Launched with high expectations and pathetically crashed. — Jerry Stahl

The sea had a way of re-energizing, of refreshing, of making one feel stronger and able to conquer life's ups and downs. They each let the strength of it seep in as they pieced the puzzle together. — J. Dana Stahl

The more you teach your people to not need you, the greater your value. — John Stahl-Wert

There was a weird intimacy, sitting in a car together. Couples sat in cars. Cops and their partners. Strangers became unstrange, sharing a windshield view of the world. — Jerry Stahl

It's not like I was an alkie or anything. Alcohol is for cleaning needles — Jerry Stahl

It is actually against the law for a citizen to give money to a terrorist. — Lesley Stahl

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr ... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode. — Jerry Stahl

Heroin spread that soft blanket over everything. But once the blanket was ripped off, it took a layer of skin with it, leaving nothing but nerve ends screaming in the breeze. — Jerry Stahl

For me there was never a lot of glamor involved in being a junkie, it was about trying to hide the puke and bloodstains on my shirt. — Jerry Stahl

The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less. — Jerry Stahl

I always tell myself, when I remember the non-stop self-generated hell party that used to be my life, I wouldn't be here if I didn't go there. — Jerry Stahl

It's not like I ever wanted to wake up and just be a grossly overpaid, self-loathing, can't-look-in-the-mirror-without-gagging TV writer. — Jerry Stahl

The traditional dictionary definition of the difference is that an alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout, come to, and apologize for it. A junkie will steal your wallet and then help you look for it. But ultimately I think all addictions boil down to just not being able to be with yourself for any long degree of time. — Jerry Stahl

About eight days ago I discovered that sulfur in burning, far from losing weight, on the contrary, gains it; it is the same with phosphorus; this increase of weight arises from a prodigious quantity of air that is fixed during combustion and combines with the vapors. This discovery, which I have established by experiments, that I regard as decisive, has led me to think that what is observed in the combustion of sulfur and phosphorus may well take place in the case of all substances that gain in weight by combustion and calcination; and I am persuaded that the increase in weight of metallic calyxes is due to the same cause ... This discovery seems to me one of the most interesting that has been made since Stahl and since it is difficult not to disclose something inadvertently in conversation with friends that could lead to the truth I have thought it necessary to make the present deposit to the Secretary of the Academy to await the time I make my experiments public. — Antoine Lavoisier

You get greatness out of people by expecting it. — John Stahl-Wert

John Hawkes is amazing. I really want to meet that man; he's so good. Him and Ben Foster, and I'm a big fan of Nick Stahl - those are my three guys. — Rory Culkin

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

In my family, misery didn't just love company, it wanted hostages. — Jerry Stahl

With enough rock in your system, you could hear every noise in the universe. — Jerry Stahl

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

I wasn't sad after my father kissed the streetcar. If anything, it was a relief. Much as I missed him, his dying gave me an excuse to feel the way I already felt. Which was the way I felt right now, under the laundry room fluorescents: hollow, pissed off, wanting to be wherever I wasn't. Until I got there. Then I wanted to be somewhere else. — Jerry Stahl

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. — Jerry Stahl

What would yo do for a piece of forever? What would you do to love more,feel more, and live more? — Shey Stahl

You can't see something shining if you're eyes are closed. — Shey Stahl

Sometimes, it's like you know what people think: You know what they're thinking, and you know it's wrong. All you want to do if change their mind, but you can't. — Jerry Stahl

She felt that the diving image of Mme Stahl that she had carried in her soul for a whole month had vanished irretrievably ... And by no effort of imagination could she bring back the former Mme Stahl. — Leo Tolstoy

If You Don't Believe in You, No One Else Can What's fun in life is knowing you're not good at something and then making yourself good at it. - Lesley Stahl — Susan Wilson Solovic

I began to understand that my life was measured in moments. There were moments that tested you, challenged you, and moments that could make you fall to your knees, begging for one more moment but you see, those moments defined you as a person. You need to take them as they come because before you know it, you're out of moments. — Shey Stahl

Well, it was very interesting to play a character and stretch it over such a long time - 12 episodes. I had never done a TV show before, so week to week it was unclear what we would be asked to do. — Nick Stahl

I used to say, for me, writing was like walking a high wire, and heroin made me forget there was no net. Which is a fancy way of saying dope made me forget how shitty I felt for being on dope. — Jerry Stahl

Death Anyway meant "What the hell, even Hemingway sucked on a shotgun ... " Death Anyway, when you came down to it, meant why in God's name would you want to be Pre-Law, Pre-Med, or Pre-Anything, when any microbe could see that just being alive was no more than Pre-Death.( ... ) That was the world, to me. If you showed up - if you did what they told you to do - you'd still end up with your skull in bloody gauze or your balls hanging from a branch. So why bother? Nothing mattered. Death anyway ... — Jerry Stahl

Expect little, and we live up to the expectation. Expect a lot, and we stretch and grow to meet the expectation. — John Stahl-Wert

I'm done pretending you don't mean anything to me.That you still don't.I loved you.I love you now,here.The bone deep shit that you try to capture in a song or a movies or a book, that kind of shit. It's the type of love that words can't compare to. I still love you. I never stopped. Time apart never changed that for me. — Shey Stahl

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. — Jerry Stahl

Not until you finally try to put down the stuff do you realize, with stinging clarity, precisely why you picked it up in the first place. All life, in this freshly nerve-flayed state, boils down to a choice of hells. The hell of being fucked-up on drugs or the hell of being fucked-up without them. — Jerry Stahl

Don't have regrets or second thoughts." she told me" Love, love with all your heart,every piece of it.Love anything as much as you can. — Shey Stahl

Sometimes you find that there is better material in small and more independent movies. There's more risk-taking. — Nick Stahl

Have you ever been in love? It's a question you're asked a lot as a kid from your friends, adults, anyone. They're curious. How do you know you're in love? Do we even really know what love means? It's just a word to define a feeling. — Shey Stahl

This was a relationship I wanted to savor, and put ahead of the demands of my job or anything else tugging at my time and attention. I now had a new first priority.

But there was something more at work here, something mysterious welling up inside me. It wasn't that I hadn't been told that becoming a grandmother was the best thing that ever happens to a woman. But what I couldn't get over was the physicality of my feelings. When I got into bed at night I would pretend I was holding the baby in my arms. I was infatuated. Dare I say it? It felt like - ardor. — Lesley Stahl

Where are we going tonight?"
"To meet Eddy at the Brickyard again. It's Thirsty Thursday apparently."
"Oh no, not participating in Thirsty Thursday. Wasted Wednesday was enough for me."
"Just be thankful it's not Mystery Monday or Tanked Tuesday. — Shey Stahl

Let me tell you something. Boring women get a bad rap. There's a lot to be said for boring women. — Jerry Stahl

Did I get my picture in the yearbook under "Most Likely to Commit Suicide"? — Jerry Stahl

Sometimes everything changes and you're left wondering how it happened and where you could have down shifted. — Shey Stahl

Being in love is a strange thing. Even when you hate the person for saying or doing something, you don't stop loving them. You may want to or even go as far to say you won't, but when you love them, truly love them, it never goes away. — Shey Stahl

If you want to do something that really changes someone's life, the best thing you can do is make the person you're trying to help a participant in the process. — John Stahl-Wert

My mouth tastes like bad decisions. — Shey Stahl

Pat Boone still didn't cover public cunt-licks in Tips for Teens, and there really wasn't anybody to ask. — Jerry Stahl

Becoming a gran exhilarated me with a new purpose. The change was so big & granular & unexpected, I wanted to understand it. .,.. Does it happen this way to all grandmothers? — Lesley Stahl

To me, God is like this happy bus driver. — Jerry Stahl

Our love was dangerous.
It was asking me to come with him.
It was "South it is, brown eyes."
It was dancing in the rain on the hood of his car.
It was making dents that only we knew.
It was living in the moment and making memories and deals.
It was being in love and having your heart ripped from your chest. Here you take it, I don't want it anymore. It was that kind of shit.
It was "Please don't do this, not here."
It was here now, listen to me.
It was waiting, I water, and we waited. Nothing.
It was remembering every detail, everything that made him Dylan Wade and remembering nothing at all. — Shey Stahl

I don't know of anybody's political bias at CBS News. We try very hard to get any opinion that we have out of our stories, and most of our stories are balanced. — Lesley Stahl

I can't tell people what flag to fly. — Lesley Stahl

Serving Leaders work hard to get obstacles out of the way so others can make progress. — John Stahl-Wert

At 17, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes. — Jerry Stahl

You may think you don't want to throw your life away for mere fleeting euphoria. But, once you get a taste, it doesn't feel so mere.
From then on the planet becomes a waiting room. The rest of your life devolves to no more than the time between highs. — Jerry Stahl

Oh man. If I had magic powers ... I would hope that I would use them for good. I think I would. But I would do something pretty trivial like making traffic disappear. — Nick Stahl

In my experience sometimes the darker the material that you're doing, the more necessary it is to have some sort of levity around. I've worked on more lighthearted pieces that have been more brutal and tougher to make. — Nick Stahl

I had no idea how fast we were going but i could have sworn on a stack of bibles, I saw Jesus when my face was inches from the wall on the third straightaway — Shey Stahl

All I think about now is her amazing body wrapped around mine and broken furniture. And race car hoods and bearing alignment, assembly lubes and aligns boring. God honey, the affect you have on me is ... unbelievable. — Shey Stahl

Serving Leaders build teaching organizations to create excellence at every level. — John Stahl-Wert

All my life I'd gone for women who were a little off. — Jerry Stahl

Still ... I would have hugged my mother if we were the kind of family who hugged. If touching her weren't impossible. If her subnightie waft was not so utterly, fatally repulsive. That's how much I loved her. — Jerry Stahl

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

Who says you have to live for right now? What if you can have the greatest love of your life, but you have to relive the past to find it again? Who says going back to the beginning won't make you happy right now? — Shey Stahl

You know those moments, whether you're in them or not, you feel something more than what you intended to feel, what you wanted to feel. — Shey Stahl

How can you think that? Don't you see it, Ro? The blood that runs through my veins, the air that fills my lungs, it belongs to you. It's only ever be you for me. — Shey Stahl

I know it sounds lame, but I have to dig the way you think, and I have to feel you get me. My whole fucking life, I pretended I could relate to chicks so I could get into their pants. Then once I got in, all I wanted was out again. — Jerry Stahl

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. — Jerry Stahl

It was our story, played out on the open highway chasing sunsets. It wasn't an easy story to tell you. It was a story of kisses, lust, passion, youth, mistakes, lies, hiding, stupidity, judging, but most of all, love. — Shey Stahl

I believe that people come into your life and then some go.I also think there's a purpose as to why they were in your life at all.Each one takes a piece of you when they go.Some leave pieces of themselves with you.Sometimes its's wisdom, or maybe,it's a lesson. — Shey Stahl

You never know when the best day of your life is going to be. — Lesley Stahl

Be alive, be wide awake, be anything but boring. — Shey Stahl

Chymia, or Alchemy and Spagyrism, is the art of resolving compound bodies into their principles and of combining these again. — Georg Ernst Stahl

If I closed my eyes, I could almost count those soft hairs on the back of her neck. One day I'd even leaned forward, pretending to drop my pencil, and inhaled her until the top of my head started to steam. A scent of butterscotch wafted off of her, and it was all I could do not to plunge my face into her shag. — Jerry Stahl

Everybody knows if it's on the Internet, some brilliant hacker can get at it. — Lesley Stahl

What we craved was drugs. What we had was each other. — Jerry Stahl

If you're here for four more years or four more weeks, you're here right now. I think when you're somewhere, you ought to be there. It's not about how long you stay in a place, it's about what you do while you're there, and when you go, is that place any better for your having been there? — Jerry Stahl

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

Our dirty talking quickly turned to "Do you need a good spanking?" which I enjoyed but when it turned to "Who's your daddy?" I slapped him across the face and told him to shut the hell up and just fuck me — Shey Stahl

Change. It could happen in the blink of an eye and it wasn't always bad. Sometimes change was good. Sometimes it showed you where you were meant to be all along. — Shey Stahl

The strict mother she & her brother had grown up with was body-snatched. "...Who are you? What did you do with my mother? — Lesley Stahl

I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney. — Jerry Stahl

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'
Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn") — Cornell Woolrich

Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later. — Jerry Stahl

I need - and occasionally love - to write for the same reasons I always did: hard as writing is, it's generally easier than life. — Jerry Stahl

I knew one thing, this pit lizard was going to have a good time tonight! — Shey Stahl

I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop ... this ... fucking ... feeling. — Jerry Stahl

I think it's just too kinda juicy and compelling to imagine people in their private lives, but then half the time people's private lives are just so much more bizarre and Ted Haggard-like than you could ever imagine. It's almost hard to write fiction anymore. — Jerry Stahl

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. — Jerry Stahl

Being a junkie, when you broke it down, was nothing more than a crazed day job. — Jerry Stahl

I was trying to understand my grandmother feelings. Why, when I looked at and held the baby, I felt I was floating, that I was on a high.... I keep wanting to burst into song!
So I wasn't crazy, & I wasn't alone. When a grandmother holds the baby, her brain, like a new mother's, can also be drenched in the bonding hormone oxytocin.
Aha! There it was. We grandmas literally, actually fall in love. — Lesley Stahl

Tina hit that tingle in the back of his head, the fuse that usually stayed damp, the one that got lit on those rare occasions when he met a woman who actually scared him. It was sort of like sex, but harder to find. — Jerry Stahl