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.

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There’s a fantastic joy in destroying something that...

People said that ‘Fight Club’ would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.

I don’t think ‘Guts’ could get financed as a movie.

your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it’s all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.

She says, “I’ll swear by the rose tattooed on my ass, that old man raped me.”Here, the funeral parade stops. At this point, Comrade Snarky is a victim among victims. The rest of us —...

Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I’m sick and tired of it.How this feels is I’m just another task in God’s daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after...

Reality means you live until you die…the real truth is nobody wants reality.

..statues of saints in somebody else’s religion. To me they’re just rock shaped into glorified nobodies.

My mom says, “Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?”Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice...

Angel says that rich people don’t like to tolerate much. 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...

Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.

Most times, it’s just a lot easier not to let the world know what’s wrong.

Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It’s because they know what it’s like to be treated like an animal.

I haven’t had a TV in 10 years, and I really don’t miss it. ‘Cause it’s always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.

I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it’s good to add more emotion and chaos.

The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.

So much of ‘Fight Club’ was a rant against fathers.

Any ‘artist’ makes a living by expressing what others can’t – because they’re unaware of their feelings, they’re too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood.

My parents divorced about the same time the movie ‘The Parent Trap’ came out, about two twins at camp who scheme to get their parents back together. I had that same fantasy.

Writing gave me the world.

When I visit my brother in South Africa, I order things I’ve only seen in zoos. Little deers and kudu, all the mammals you would never think of eating.

That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can’t control life, at least you can control your version.

Make me into anything, but just love me.