Art never comes from happiness.

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

For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose … watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.

By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior....

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that’s a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

Suicide is very contagious.

My mom would spy by satellite, turning down the air conditioning, colder and colder, with a tapping keystroke via her wireless connection, chilling that house, that one room, meat locker cold, ski-slope cold, spending a...

To be honest, I hate silence.

A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

My books didn’t fit a marketing niche.

We kind of deny the stages of life.

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There’s a fantastic joy in destroying something that...

People said that ‘Fight Club’ would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.

I don’t think ‘Guts’ could get financed as a movie.

your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it’s all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.

She says, “I’ll swear by the rose tattooed on my ass, that old man raped me.”Here, the funeral parade stops. At this point, Comrade Snarky is a victim among victims. The rest of us —...

Tyler lies back and asks, “If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing?”I say, goodnight.The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling and Tyler says, “Clawing at the lid of...

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As...

If you’re male, and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career.

You can’t be beautiful until you feel beautiful.

My mom says, “Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?”Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice...

Angel says that rich people don’t like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn’t pretty and perfect. You can’t put up with anything less than lovely. You...

Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.

Most times, it’s just a lot easier not to let the world know what’s wrong.

Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It’s because they know what it’s like to be treated like an animal.

I haven’t had a TV in 10 years, and I really don’t miss it. ‘Cause it’s always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.

I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it’s good to add more emotion and chaos.

The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.

So much of ‘Fight Club’ was a rant against fathers.

Any ‘artist’ makes a living by expressing what others can’t – because they’re unaware of their feelings, they’re too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood.

My parents divorced about the same time the movie ‘The Parent Trap’ came out, about two twins at camp who scheme to get their parents back together. I had that same fantasy.

Writing gave me the world.

When I visit my brother in South Africa, I order things I’ve only seen in zoos. Little deers and kudu, all the mammals you would never think of eating.

That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can’t control life, at least you can control your version.

Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I’m sick and tired of it.How this feels is I’m just another task in God’s daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after...

Reality means you live until you die…the real truth is nobody wants reality.

..statues of saints in somebody else’s religion. To me they’re just rock shaped into glorified nobodies.

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only...

The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.

It’s obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O’Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing...

For years now, I’ve wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.

After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake… This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

Jack Palance was my distant uncle – that’s the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become...

The answer is there is no answer.

I’ve always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they’re reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They’re conflicted by the idea that they don’t know what’s next....

Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people’s defenses.

Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion… What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.

You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap. We’re all singing, all dancing crap of...