I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.

they should let some people into the library by prescription only

Good news didn’t seem real until you’d told at least a dozen friends.

We’ve taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

Since boyhood, fury had become his father. His older brother. His only protector. Fury gave him strength and courage and spurred him to always move forward despite always getting things wrong and always failing and...

The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.

Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club.

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life...

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It’s kind of like trick-or-treating.

While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.

When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she’d read a dozen a month.

I always thought I’d write when I retired – when I turned 65.

Everybody’s trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can’t stop.

You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character…Would you slow down? Or speed up?

For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium...

My first time I jacked off, I thought I’d invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.

The evil queen was stupid to play Snow White’s game. There’s an age where a woman has to move on to another kind of power. Money, for example. Or a gun.

If you never been rabid, you ain’t never lived.

What’s burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It’s a hundred generations removed from anything...

We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.

Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.

More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.

Portland is quickly becoming one of those lovely, lush Third World countries where kinda-rich people retire with their money.

My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.

In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that’s implied before it and the line...

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

I come from generations of farmers.

Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I’m wondering how clean this gun is.

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

When you’re thinking about the rest of your life, you’re never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.

Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes.

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

Penny wanted this kind of attention from the world. She wanted people everywhere to know her name and to love her. There, she’d admitted it aloud. But she couldn’t do anything that would justify such...

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?

She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.

[W]hat makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.

As human beings, our first commandment is:Something needs to happen

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying...

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

I love the power of words – no music or special effects – and I want to demonstrate that power.

In 2008, while the film version of my book ‘Choke’ was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about...

Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion – painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little...

I haven’t had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn’t hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in...

I used rebellion as a way to hide out. We use criticism as a fake participation.