You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.

If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing ‘real’ was at risk, what would you do? You’d live a...

I will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.

That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I’m doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I’m not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.

In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You’d be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it.

My first four books, from ‘Fight Club’ to ‘Choke,’ dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.

I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored...

During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside...

You can’t fool people into loving you.

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an...

It’s funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.

What if reality is nothing but some disease?

To Mr. Jones, she said, imagine you’re looking up at a blue sky, and imagine a tiny airplane skywriting the letter Z. Then let the wind erase the letter. Then imagine the plane writing the...

He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,’ he says, ‘the same way this theater seems to digest people.’ With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky...

Everyone wants to feel special – attain a special status among their pears- but not too special. Most kids want to be special the same way their friends are

I think, in a way, I invented the term ‘fight club’ and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created...

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

As we grow older I always think, why didn’t I do more when I was young, why didn’t I risk more?

My publisher’s been shipping me to comic-cons, and it seems that my readership overlaps perfectly with the comic-con crowd.

My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation – often elevated loneliness – to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not...

My books are all fantastically sentimental.

Discovering the ‘impossible’ ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit.

I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can’t live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.

No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed...

The big reason why folks leave a small town,’ Rant used to say, ‘is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon...

trichloroethane […] All my extensive testing has shown this to be the best treatment for a dangerous excess of human knowledge

We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

The only way that America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate the Third World? Should we be surprised that the AIDS virus showed up about 1975? Do you understand what...

Where would Jesus be if no one ever wrote the gospels?

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.

By the time you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.

On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

I’m trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.

There’s a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

I wouldn’t get nearly as many books written if I lived in New York. The Columbia Gorge is fantastic. When the sun shines, I just want to be outdoors.

I usually write in my kitchen, which is a large, octagonal room that looks into woods – three big windows look out into the trees.

Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.

Once I start writing, I can’t stop.

My policy is to not read any reviews.

If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.

You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.

Anymore, no one’s mind is their own.

The lucky ones are just born dead.

If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty...

I was very invested in love but it was just this long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it’s about getting off.

It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up what you’re trying to say.