The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

Art never comes from happiness.

Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f— you up, every time.

Give me lust, baby.Flash.Give me malice.Flash.Give me detached existentialist ennui.Flash.Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.Flash.

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you’re loving somebody when you’re just using them. This only looks like love.

Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn’t glitter and shine.

I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with...

As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that’s no guarantee you’ll create anything worth all your effort. You’re always haunt by the...

I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.

I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn’t born, he’s made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

Just let your hand drop; and let fate decide for you.

Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.

But if you tell folks you’re a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person...

I’m always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot...

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

I don’t do much more than organise other people’s ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.

My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way.

I think that I am responsible for the death of thousands of things and for the misery of thousands of people, just through the things that I buy and how I live my life, and...

I’m only confrontational with my friends.

The third person allows characters to really attack themselves. We all do this – attack ourselves – every hour of our lives.

My parents used to fight a lot, and I think they fought a lot at night, and they would turn the television up to hide the sound of their fighting.

I asked if Tyler was an artist. Tyler shrugged…What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. . . he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand...

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the...

The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill

Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but...

Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.

According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn’t it just lie there and rot?

Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.

I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.

I tell everyone I interact with what I’m working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.

I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.

With a book, you’re guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just...

I write in a noisy, distracting world so the books can be read there.

I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored...

During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside...

What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted...

Skinny guys fight till they’re burger.

There’s still a thousand places I haven’t gone to die.

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it...

A woman eats to feed her pussy.” Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification.

These are Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth. I am Tyler’s mouth. I am Tyler’s hands.

We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we’ve been speaking English as a second language so long that we’ve forgotten it as our first.I have no native tongue.

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.

If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing ‘real’ was at risk, what would you do? You’d live a...

I will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.