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.

Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.

Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.

Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that’s usually how you end up crying?

I used to work as a volunteer in a hospice, but I don’t have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything, so I was what they call an escort. I would take people to...

Arguing that God doesn’t exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn’t exist because they couldn’t see them.

Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.

I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There’s such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it – Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace,...

I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.

I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.

Aim low and you won’t be disappointed.

I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the...

I still love him so much I’ll hide any amount of conjugated estrogen in his food. So much I’ll do anything to destroy him.

This is your life, and its ending one minute at a time.

Ideas come at any moment — except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I’m physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.My first draft is always...

This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

No, Miss Wright didn’t want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She’d expect that young man to...

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

You had a near life experience.

The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make...

I am nothing, and not even that.

My private history in terms of people in my life who are dead is very easy to discuss. I don’t feel those people can be threatened or intruded upon now. But I am enormously protective...

I really love idiot, enlightened characters – these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.

The first step to eternal life is you have to die.

David Fincher is a genius.

‘Romance’ is based on my entire creative process. I fall in love with an idea, obsess over it, isolate myself with it, and when I eventually introduce it to my friends, they all tell me...

I don’t know if you ever really feel like you’ve made it.

Movie brawls tend to be bloodless and quick.

Every garden looks beautiful in May.’ Meaning: Everyone is somewhat attractive when she’s young.

If this is death, if we are dead or dying or even if we are living and just going to die, then what do we have to fear? What are we worried about? I think...

The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don’t participate.

The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you’ll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the...

It’s all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

If you never have sex you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from...

In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.