Gone with the Mind Quotes

“But that's what nonfiction is, people. Shitty feelings and encounters with death.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“If I were asked to give a commencement speech (which I'll never be), I'd say basically: They're all gonna laugh at you. Life is pretty much like Carrie's prom. So ... stay secret.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“I really think this kind of consensual cannibalism is such a perfect analogue for the reciprocal relationship between writer and reader, and especially between writers and readers of autobiography. The reader of an autobiography consumes the life of the author, and the author, in turn, consumes the life of the reader, that portion of it surrendered to reading, or listening to, the autobiography.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“There is something unspeakably consoling in one's own smile. In that reflection, you can discern the face of yourself as a child and the face of yourself as a corpse. And in this moment, all the fundamental antinomies are reconciled--the sacred and the profane, the analyst and the analysand, the celebrated success and the abject failure. The pilot and the passenger. Writer and reader. Fiction and nonfiction. Past and present. And the mind that abides and the mind that is gone.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“And I still believe that there are two basic kinds of people--people who cultivate the narcissistic delusion of being watched at all times through the viewfinder of a camera, and people who cultivate the paranoid delusion of being watched at all times through the high-powered optics of a sniper's rifle, and I think I fall--and have always fallen--into this latter category.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“I stink, therefore I think.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“We're all adults here—we all know the score. We know what they do to people like me and my mom, to paradoxical hybrids of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naïveté. We know what happens to unreconstructed surrealist militants. Tortured. Marked for assassination. Imagine what awaits me out there.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“If I say I'm going to write an autobiography in the form of a first-person shooter game that ends with unraveling the zygote in your mother's uterus then I'm going to write an autobiography in the form of a first-person shooter game that ends with unraveling the zygote in your mother's uterus, and that's that.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“post hoc ergo propter hoc…after this, therefore because of this.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“The hours you spent reading this really do represent an irrevocable loss for you. You can never get that time back. That part of your life is gone forever. I’m profoundly grateful to you for that.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“In 1955, the year my mom was pregnant with me, Bertolt Brecht voted Mao Zedong’s essay “On Contradiction” the “best book” he had read in the past twelve months, a period of time that saw the publication of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! Mao…a guy who never brushed his teeth, who just rinsed his mouth out with tea when he woke up…who, according to his personal physician, Li Zhisui, never cleaned his genitals. Instead, Mao said, “I wash myself inside the bodies of my women.” The Imaginary Intern and I were great admirers of Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art and we diligently tried to apply his dictum “Discard what is backward and develop what is revolutionary” to the production of Gone with the Mind, and although I agree with Mao that one should bathe infrequently, and that when one does, one should use the vaginal flora of other creatures instead of soap, I subscribe unswervingly to the conviction that a gentleman should never go out in public at night without pomaded hair and heavy cologne…”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“I don’t know what made me think of this…oh, oh, I actually do know. My mom and I got here a little early tonight, so I went over to the, uh…the Foot Locker, just to look around, kill time…and you know how they have all the different sections for the different kinds of sneakers, like a running section, a basketball section, etc.…So I saw this sign for cross-training sneakers, and that’s what made me think of this…I don’t know if you guys have ever run into people who do this cute sort of thing when you’re talking to them, where if you say, “XYZ,” they’ll say, “You’re XYZ”…I knew this girl who used to do it all the time…like I’d say something like “There’s a hegemonic imperative in cross-training,” and she’d say, “You’re a hegemonic imperative in cross-training.” Or we’d be out at a restaurant, and I’d say, “That pasta looks like a bowl of infant foreskins,” and she’d say, “You’re a bowl of infant foreskins.” So once, the Imaginary Intern said to me—and I don’t remember what the context was—but he said that “memory (and, in a sense, autobiography) is like a rash that blossoms and fades,” and I said to him, “You’re like a rash that blossoms and fades.” And then, after he was gone, I realized that he actually was like a rash that had blossomed and faded…an ache that time won’t assuage.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“If I were ever asked by some young, sensitive writer just starting out, what key lesson I've learned in life (which I'll never be), I'd probably say that there is no aperture of egress, however tiny and exquisitely sensitive, that can't be turned into an aperture of ingress.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“I also think my mom 'suffers' from something one might call Pollyanna's paranoia, an irrational suspicion that there are people out there secretly trying to do good things to you, that there are all sorts of hidden perks lurking everywhere, almost like the Easter eggs in video games...that it's possible that Raoul's might be running some sort of unpublicized hemangioblastoma-all-the-caviar-you-can-eat promotion.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“Why would we not only believe, but become eternally beholden to some unctuous car salesman who claims to be putting the lives of his own children at risk by throwing in floor mats and a bug deflector? (I know why I would--because I'm so emotionally gullible, so desperate for tiny kindnesses in my misery.)”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“The Imaginary Intern and I used to say, 'The mind going is the mind coming,' which we meant not only in terms of the curvature of space-time (and the cosmic boomerang effect), but also in terms of sexual jouissance.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“Why do you think I'm obsessed with this idea of giving the world an alphabet-soup enema?' (This was our code language for wanting to be a writer.)
After a very long, Viennese pause, he said, 'Why do you think you are?'
And I said, 'I don't know...Prolonged exposure to radiation from violent events in deep space?”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“There are enigmas that we can gnaw on throughout our lives from which we derive sustenance, some kind of spiritual nourishment...I'm thinking of certain kinds of riddles and koans and philosophical conundrums, things like that...But there are also enigmas that, throughout our lives, gnaw on us.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“So, Strand looked at me, and he said, 'You should write about all this someday.' And I said, 'You mean about all the terrible privations and wrenching traumas from my childhood?' And he said, 'Yes, it would be hilarious!' And I said, 'You mean...nonfiction?”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“I found a note he'd left behind entitled 'Ciao':

One just keeps saying, 'No...No...No...'
Head bowed, hat in hand,
A cringing, cunning little step back,
With each dialectical evasion,
Retreating, receding, 'no...no...no...'
Until one simply disappears...”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“Yes, it was late,
and, yes, I was being very
dented-in-the-head-mutant-hillbilly,

But you...
you just sat there
like some shitty poem.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“I said I'm an exceedingly boring person ... I don't really think that. I think I'm a sort of weird composite of thrill-seeking heedlessness and crippling hyperanxiety—I mean, I've taken LSD before a root canal, but I'm equally capable of calling the police and are hospitals if my wife is even five minutes late coming home from a pedicure, so ...”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“And she told me I deserved a merit badge for it ... which was such a particularly funny, particularly uncanny thing for her to have said, because when I was about eight years old and I was a Cub Scout, all the boys in our den were sitting around in the kitchen of our den mother one afternoon, and she lit a cigarette bending over the flame from the front burner of the stove, and she set her hair on fire, and I put it out—I don't remember if I just smothered it with my hands or doused it with some Sprite or what—but she stared at me with this sort of demented look of gratitude on her face (she drank) and she said, 'I'm going to recommend that you get a merit badge for this,' and sure enough I did, I actually got a merit badge for extinguishing the fire in our den mother's hair.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“He got a booklet out of a folder. 'This is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It's a standardized psychometric test we use to assess and analyze an individual's personality dynamic. It's got about six hundred true-or-false questions. You fill this out and then the computer will generate a report.' Well, I thought this was absolutely perfect! I was just delighted with the idea that psychodiagnostic algorithms would generate a posthumanist psychiatric profile for me for the autobiography. And both the Imaginary Intern and I felt this would really streamline the process, that it would save us a tremendous amount of work, and obviate the need for all that cloying introspection and redemptive candor that we both found so nauseating and counterrevolutionary.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind