Top 32 Quotes & Sayings by Nick Tosches

I often wonder if I had the complete freedom to not have to write, if I would write. That's the one mystery that I hope I get to experience.

To me, music's something I can dance to or listen to. To write about it is always more of what the music represents, or what it reflects. Like an ideal song, to me, is a song that you can dance to, that summons up some darker and greater mystery.

When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal.

I don't have a college degree.

As a young man, I felt a need to communicate with somebody or something, but it seemed in my own particular environment that that wasn't an option. On the other hand, I probably lacked the courage to do so, even if it was an option.

For years, I never really pondered how I came to be a writer from where I came from.

The things I wanted to be when I was a kid were an archeologist, because of dinosaur bones; a garbage man, because they got to ride on the side of the trucks; and a writer.

Life is a racket. Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything's a racket.

Mortality applies to every aspect of life. The fear of death is the driving fear of life.

People think they're gonna make a living off poetry. Ten years ago, maybe a couple of people did. Right now, no one, I don't think.

I wanted to just get a job so I could have enough money for my own apartment and be able to get drunk. And I did. Back then, on $125, you could do that in Manhattan. I was 19 years old the first time I got published and paid. I think it was a hundred bucks. I stared at my name on the check for 20 minutes.

The difference of human being behind the guy on the page is in writing, I'm no longer conscious of personal repercussions because for that moment they don't exist. At times, I tell myself, Well, I can always go back and change that or take it out, and I find out that I rarely do. Couple little things here and there: Do unto others. Be a good scout. With all the ironies that entails, I go by that. That's a good way to live.

I think the tendency with parents is to make your kid not unlike the next kid but to overprotect and say, "My way's better than whatever you've got in mind." But by the time that tie's over that shoulder and they're drinking that obligatory brewski with the boys, it's like, Man, who are you people?

You're never gonna outwrite the movement of the white clouds and the blue sky. You're never going to. There are times when I try to write beautifully, but I don't know if I'm trying to exorcise my own demons. If I am, there are other ones lurking beneath, because they keep coming out. Maybe little by little I'm fumigating.

I don't know if enjoy is the right word for alcohol. I like to drink, but I don't like enforced social drinking. When I don't wanna drink, I don't wanna drink. I haven't had a desire to drink for four months. When I think of the taste of it, no desire. The trouble is the wines I love I can barely afford, which is a great method to cut down on your drinking: Drink only what you can't afford.

I think Elvis Presley will never be solved

My most recent novel didn't start out scaring me, but as I got deeper into writing it, it scared me. It's not so much where the story's going. It's where it came from. I always come out of it thinking, Okay, that got it all outta me. The next one's gonna be nice and simple, and it's not gonna scare me, and that never seems to happen.

People speaking into handheld devices while they walk down the street and saying to the device, "I'm walking down the street now." People are enslaved. I was just up in the country for a few days last week and it was great: no television, no telephone, no nothing. I walked through the woods, sat around, smoked. And it was lovely. I think the desire to be free has mutated, and we now live in an era when the slaves celebrate their slavery - this whole corporate concept of being part of a "team" at work.

They say nobody has the attention span to read great books early in life. If I start to read something good, I'll look and it's 86 pages already. Attention span. What are they talking about? If it's good, it'll drag you in.

The appeal for drugs has dwindled. Except for actual opium. If I could get real opium, I'd stir it in my hot coffee every morning. People keep giving me marijuana. I've got pouches in a drawer. I've been meaning to smoke a joint and watch Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. I planned to do this three months ago and I still haven't gotten around to it.

How do I start writing a book? I sit there, I come up with an opening line, and then I go little by little. I'll wonder, Well, what's coming? And that goes right through to the very end. For over a dozen years now, I've had a recurring dream where I'm reading a book and the pages are blank, but as I read, the words come to exist as fast as my eyes can move. Strange, strange thing.

Joe Bonomo has written a fine book: a book not only about a band or times passed, but also about the rare virtue of endurance.

We're finite creatures, doomed to never get a fraction of what wisdom it would take to deal with infinity. My book has a lot to do with the unbelievable power and beauty of that almost unattainable freedom. Since none of us really gets to know it, we don't know what extremely powerful dangers might lurk in it.

The older you get, the more you live with ghosts.

The main event is freedom. I often wonder if I had the complete freedom to not have to write, if I would write. That's the one mystery that I hope I get to experience. It might be a good idea to retire, since as this delusion of an economy progresses, it seems that if you make ten grand a year or a hundred grand a year, there's absolutely no difference.

Johnny Depp is, to me, a rare kindred spirit with like sensibilities, who has escaped the beast. He's probably one of the few people that have survived Los Angeles as a human being.

You got guys that are so old, you see them eating lunch, the drool's just coming from their mouth, and they're sending around memos about 10 percent crosscuts. If I had one tenth of their money, I would be free. They don't know what freedom is. It's a disease. You're one of the rare people that is given freedom, and what do you do with it? You don't live. You choose to be dead in life. Money buys freedom. I mean why is this guy with the slobber worried about taking food off other people's tables? His $19 billion won't get him from where he is to the grave comfortably? That to me is a disease.

The thing is, the more you fear death, the more you die. So it really doesn't pay off. It's a fear of the dark. Like any experience in life, you wonder, Well, if this ever happens, how would I react? and then it happens, and only then do you know.

I've gone more than 40 years without having to use an alarm clock or go to an office. At this point, I don't think I'd be capable of not writing. I don't think I could deprive myself of that sky. It would be like putting an animal in a cage.

Steiner has here transformed the vaporous conceptions of his life, the vapors of what never was and never will be, from their aeriform state to a fine and ethereal substantiality. My Unwritten Books is a gathering of shades, an elegant and eloquent gathering of mind, feeling, and autumnal passion. (...) And that is the lovely irony of this unique little book. None of these unwritten books should have been written. They are better here, as they are, untamed and errant phantoms of a brilliance whose emanations no one mortal lifetime could ever accommodate in full.

My father, God bless him, thought it was such an impossible desire to be able to make a living the way I do. I was destined to go into the bar business like him or go to college and be a lawyer. I was not encouraged, and in a way maybe that made me more hardheadedly committed to being a writer.

You see, I needed to go to Hell.