Famous Last Words
Night falling, mojo rising.
Get up and dance, mofo.
Celebrate life before it passes on.
For more, flip it over to the B side.
Spin the record one more time, DJ.
Classics always keep coming back.
Reincarnation is the ultimate encore.
Take a bow and get back to work, bitch.
One more flourish, and I’ll be done hon.
In my time of dying, I felt the most alive.
You can do it. You just don’t know it yet.
Keep pushing until that baby comes out.
If it ain’t over the top, it ain’t high enough.
Only in retrospect do things appear clear.
The lines just keep getting blurrier, doctor.
We never understand why until afterwards.
If you want a great ending, write it yourself.
Don’t forget to drop the mic on the way out.
Center stage is where I make my last stand.
Silence best sums up what I have left to say.
Relax, people. It will all be over soon enough.
The struggle to survive always ends in failure.
Put away the books and begin your own study.
Death is a deadline that in the end we all keep.
Witness the greatest awakening since Lazarus.
At some point, you just got to release the album.
If you want to get something done, don’t finish it.
You have to strike while the muse is in the mood.
I love words even when they don’t love me back.
It’s coming together like my old girlfriend and me.
A good conversationalist is more ear than tongue.
Wake up. — You are dying. Better get busy living.
X-Rated. — I shot my load. Now I can go to sleep.
I drank the Kool-Aid. Unfortunately, it didn’t kill me.
I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door and looking to score.
The thought of not living scares the death out of me.
I took the road less traveled and got completely lost.
Don’t officially declare me dead until I’m out of print.
I make fun of myself because I’m so rich in material.
I don’t mind facing the music as long as it ain’t Taps.
I have nothing left to my name, except my tombstone.
In my youth, they called me the proverbial young man.
Don’t ponder too long, Hamlet. The hour’s getting late.
The setbacks are what make the comebacks so sweet.
To me, a big flop is much greater than a small success.
As the papers fell around me, I scattered into obscurity.
Let’s do this in one take, please. I only want to die once.
I’m dying in the hopes that it will increase my book sales.
As long as I stand upright in at least one bookcase, I live.
Not every end deserves a eulogy, said the preacher man.
Here lie the notes from my spotty self-educational course.
An infant’s eyes behold a new world. Don’t block the light.
A tradition is merely an invention that’s made it to old age.
I will not rest until I’m collecting royalties instead of wages.
I sell myself short, so I can make a tidy profit on my failures.
Everyone wants your autograph afterwards — never before.
It’s hard to say goodbye when you don’t think you’ll be back.
After you can no longer hear them, they flatter you the most.
The lash of necessity shall strike my back no more. I’m free.
I shall not rest in peace until my death makes the front-page.
Death is the only conclusion that isn’t necessarily preliminary.
I’ve tears in my eyes since this is where we part ways, forever.
For the cynic in everyone. — It all works out in the end. We die.
By the time you get everything you want, you no longer want it.
Everything has its special spot in the grand sequence of chaos.
It’s easier to peddle smut to folks than it is to sell them a classic.
Everybody gets fifteen minutes of fame and the great ones sixty.
Pumping iron, Arnold. — You cannot get big without working out.
I thoroughly enjoyed all my curtain calls, except for the final one.
Light up the pages with inspiration and burn then them with sorrow.
I told her that I wrote most of this without notes. She said it showed.
I’ve felt the magic of existence, but never quite understood the trick.
I still have a little ways to go. I don’t have my own dressing room yet.
When you’re a clown, you cannot expect people to take you seriously.
The toughest part about editing is figuring out what should be left out.
It’s conceivable that everything’s perfect and we just don’t know it yet.
Pretty please. — Judge me in my entirety and leave out the bad parts.
See you later doesn’t work in this instance, so I’ll just bid thee farewell.
No matter what means we choose, we are all subject to the same end.
Even if only as metaphor, you have to face the firing squad eventually.
The last thing I want to be written on my headstone is he didn’t make it.
I practice a studied spontaneity and deliver it with a rehearsed realism.
You’re supposed to leave the audience wanting, so I’m pulling out early.
If you don’t listen to your critics, you’ll never profit from their observations.
Once you’ve had your first hit, your next job is proving that it wasn’t a fluke.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. — If you don’t go for it, you’ll never get it.
Self-mastery is a never-ending task that isn’t complete until your last breath.
I was such a late bloomer I ended up being one of the flowers at my funeral.
I hope I have something to show for my life at the end of it besides a corpse.
Comedy special. — I just took a bunch a bits and put it together into a show.
I was a platitude producer in the age of cliché. That’s how I made my millions.
You might not leave behind a pyramid, but do something worth remembering.
The only growth you undergo within your comfort zone is around the waistline.
Musical composition. — My writing style is mostly jazz with a rock and roll beat.
I had no choice. To keep the rhythm, I had to march to the beat of my own drum.
A well-turned phrase takes time to produce except when wit’s the manufacturer.
Marriage is for people that would rather be together in hell than alone in heaven.
The hardest part about saying something novel is camouflaging your plagiarism.
Bone-tired. — I feel like Jack Kerouac’s typewriter after he finished On the Road.
If you hope to make it to Nirvana, you better learn how to suffer on the way there.
My epitaph. — He lacked a great many things in life, but heart was not one of them.
What a tragedy! It’s my last limousine ride, and I’m too damn stiff to drink the bubbly.
My hunch is that silence is the last refrain, but I’m still praying for a chorus of angels.
’bout time. — I’m done wasting moments and waiting for something better. Here it is.
The Grateful Dead. — The long strange trip is over. Looks like I came to a dead-end.
Songwriting principles. — I don’t burn bridges. I need them to connect my sentences.
Try eating it. — I’ve studied the pudding intimately, but I still I haven’t found any proof.
If I had known what I was going to find, I would have looked for myself somewhere else.
The hardest task that can be imposed on a man is to ask him to live by his own maxims.
In a finished work of art, we find the remnants of inspiration and the residue of discipline.
For Frooky. — Yo, bro. If I’ve forgotten you, forgive me. You walk with me and I with you.
Plumbing the depths. — I went as deep as I could, and I still barely scratched the surface.
Let it all hang out. — I wanted to be original, so I decided to pose for posterity in the nude.
I looked into her eyes one last time and said, “Keep me in your heart and by your bedside.”
Making the grade. — I hope my funeral shows that I passed the tests of love and friendship.
Crapola payola. — To create a masterpiece, you have to produce a lot of caca in the process.
Mistakes are a necessary by-product of learning, but they shouldn’t outweigh the actual goods.
The Graduate. — In my youth, I threw caution to the wind. Now, I wish I had gone into plastics.
A recognized weakness isn’t as dangerous as the one that remains a stranger to our acquaintance.
I’m ready for the darkness. I’ve heard the chimes of midnight with the volume turned all the way up.
Tribute to Donne and Hemmingway. — I should have known better than to ask for whom the bell tolls.
I’m having a difficult time leaving the stage because I’m not quite sure heaven is waiting in the wings.
Dearest Mother. — I reached to hold on as I grasped for her hand, not wanting to leave my native land.
I will only consider my education complete after they have shoveled the last scoop of dirt on my grave.
Humbling experience. — If it weren’t for the court jester, the king would forget that he is human and fallible.
You have to cut a hell of a figure to be remembered for all time. And, even then, your legacy isn’t guaranteed.
Before you leave the stage, may they throw flowers your way. It’s not nearly as rewarding after you croak.
I was exactly expecting a hero’s welcome at the pearly gates, but a couple clapping hands would have been nice.
I took Emerson’s advice and hitched my wagon to a star. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a Black Hole.
Eye in the sky. — I practiced the golden rule religiously, at least, when I thought somebody was watching.
I remember my finest hour with great fondness, but I still think they gypped me out of a couple of minutes.
To the tune of a different ear, maybe, my mad cacophony of notes sounds like a well-orchestrated symphony.
Judgment day. — I’m going to meet my maker, and I’m going to complain like hell about the flaws in my design.
Longing for the past. — You ever find yourself attempting to recover what you once so desperately tried to escape.
I want to offer my sincerest apologies and deepest condolences to all those poor sentences that didn’t make the cut.
He began his quest searching for the meaning of the universe only to end up shipwrecked on the small island of self-doubt.
The wait-and-see attitude towards life won’t get you anywhere. You have to make it happen, lazy fuck.
Dan the Man. — I once asked my uncle what his philosophy of life was. He said, “Why buy fries?” Well, this potato head is still puzzled.
Mixed signals. — If you want to win the race, don’t let up on the pedal until you cross the finish line. If you want to enjoy the trip, don’t rush it.
If you forget the people that were there for you when you were down and out, you’re a schmuck. Remember them and be a mensch.
At the end, in my final moments, I need just one consolation: that I have lived and not wasted the little time that was given to me.
If you take all the preceding sentences and add them up, you’ve almost got the whole story.
And for those of you that start a book by reading the last sentence first, this is but the beginning.
(Fade out)