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...

Wszystko zgodnie z sugestiami mojej mamy. W następnym tygodniu zaczynam zapisywać rozmaite szczegóły. […] Najlepsi ludzie piją whiskey, mówi.

If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?’Clawing at the roof of her coffin.

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. Let Big Brother do the singing and...

Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby.

How she looks is watered-down.How she looks is disappearing.How she looks is erased.”Don’t stress”, she says. “This is just me not wearing any makeup.

Isn’t a kid alive who doesn’t dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.

Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded–the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]

Put the gun to my head and paint walls with my brains.

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.

The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.

Nobody’s told me anything to date that I’ve been completely reviled by.

At the age of 31, I realized, ‘Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.’

Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it’s not the king any more.

Sometimes, like in ‘Invisible Monsters,’ I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

I write nothing but contemporary romances.

First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.

After fight club you’re so relaxed, you just cannot care.

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.

In capitalist nation, all is decided by money.

You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

Listening, it occurred to Randall that the love people feel for animals is the purest form of love. Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something...

If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

I think in a way, you’re doomed, once you can envision something. You’re sort of doomed to make it happen. I’ve found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that’s usually the moment...

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.

Your life isn’t about doing one perfect ‘thing’ and then falling down dead. It’s more like going to church or writing a book. You do it over and over, always trying to be a little...

When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away from other people, and my writing sucked. Now I have a laptop; I can do...

I try to forget about the expectation that’s out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I’m not trying to please them. I’ve spent a huge amount of time not communicating...

In my family, we can’t just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.

Death is a long process,” Archer says. “Your body is just the first part of you that croaks.” Meaning: Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. And your anger about investing a...

I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it’s...

Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you.

Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.

Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless.

Maybe it’s just a daughter’s job to piss off her mother.

The future is just wasted on some people.

It’s my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.

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...