Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with...

In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to...

My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for...

To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.

It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can’t shut them up.

I know that I’m going to die and that you’re going to die. I can’t do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story...

The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can’t write a story where someone is a simple victim because it’s boring.

So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They’re lived through movies; they’re lived through what we watch on television – they’re not actual events in our life.

Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that’s when we can start talking about equal rights.

They’d told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent

Could you hold the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth, please?

You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how...

The first step – especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money – the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the...

The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.

Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.

Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?

Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.

Ignorance was bliss.

If you ask me, reincarnation is just another way to procrastinate.

At school I was lazy. But I started working when I was 15, washing dishes at a local truck stop restaurant. I was really, really bored with school, and I wanted to get a job...

My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly – all these make for great stories.

The best fights don’t occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.

Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.

I think a lot of people saw ‘Fight Club’ and thought, ‘Right, here’s our next Che Guevara, here’s our next Fidel Castro, here’s someone who’s going to wave the flag.’ And I was like, ‘No,...

I am enormously uncool. I’ve made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I’m fine with that.

I’ve got two dogs; they’re Boston terriers, and they’re allowed everywhere.

My stomach hurts, but if it’s guilt or impacted stool, I can’t tell. Either way, I’m so full of shit.

We just had a near-life experience!

Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.

Hayati dogru duzgun yasamak icin egitilmisiz biz. Hata yapmamak icin. Ne kadar buyuk bir hata yaparsam, o kadar kurtulma ve gercek bir hayat yasama sansim olacagini fark ettim.

She says, “Do you have any rubbers?” I say, I thought she was barren. “Sure, I’m sterile,” she says, “but I’ve had unprotected sex with a million guys. I could have some terrible fatal disease.”...

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 spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.

There’s no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can’t re-create what’s over.

The idea that I can’t share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.

What makes the earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it ought to feel like Heaven.

To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard.

The best thing about getting a flu shot is that you never again need to wash your hands. That’s how I see it.

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

We’re so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.

Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge...

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here.

Prepare to evacuate soul in ten, in nine, eight.Chloe’s splashing through the ankle-deep back-up of renal fluid from her failed kidneys.Death will commence in five.Five, four.Around her, a parasitic life spray paints her heart.Four, three.Three,...

Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn’t bother to torture you if she didn’t.

Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight. Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.

If she was going to die, Marla didn’t want to know about it.

It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one.

Your folks are god, you love them and you want to make them happy but you still want to make up your own rules.

At this rate, we’ll never get to the future.