Art never comes from happiness.

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

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

A girl calls and asks, “Does it hurt very much to die?””Well, sweetheart,” I tell her, “yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.

Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they’d leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a...

Sex pretty much cures everything.

Prepare to evacuate soul in five, in four, three, two, one.

When you understand, that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past...

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher.

… the first step to eternal live is you have to die.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.

Since September 11, 2001, the real world has become too scary for a lot of people to be with – all the time.

The bright future is that readers are accepting more varied forms of stories.

My goal is more to be remembered. They’ll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they’ll read my books.

The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy...

You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is...

Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in...

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they...

Believe in me and you shall die, forever.

It’s not love or anything, but I think I like you, too.

You can tell people the truth, but they’ll never believe you until the event. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative...

Until today, it really pissed me off that I’d become this totally centered Zen Master, and nobody had noticed. Still, i’m doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around...

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it’s the things you don’t do, and you get screwed.

Of the big horror movies of the ’70s, you have ‘The Omen,’ ‘The Sentinel,’ ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘The Stepford Wives,’ ‘Burnt Offerings’ – these are all romantic fatalist movies where there’s a sort of glimmer of...

If you don’t believe what other people believe, then they’ll accuse you of being nihilistic.

I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.

One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they’re able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they...

The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.

There’s a television show, ‘Hoarders,’ where people have those homes filled with stuff. Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we’ve got a story about absolutely everything.

I fought against everything, but more and more I worry that I was never for anything.I can criticize and complain and judge everything, but what does that get me?Griping isn’t the same as creating something....

The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.

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.

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.