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.

Real smart begins when you quit quoting other people.

I’m an invisible monster. I’m incapable of loving anybody. You don’t know which is worse.

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… it’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.

You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they...

My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash...

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman’s right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ or the backlash against feminism...

My grandfather was hit over the head by a crane boom in Seattle. Some of the family claimed he was never a violent, crazy person before that. Some say he was. It depends who you...

When I first read the story ‘Guts’ in workshop – my fellow writers that I’ve been meeting with for almost 20 years – they laughed; they didn’t have any kind of shock reaction.

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead.

If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.