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

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let’s say you’re southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of...

some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

It sounds as if you’d like to be God.

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they...

It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we don’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it’s for sure unexplainable. Even God.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and...

It’s okay if there isn’t a God anymore, but I still want to respect something. I don’t want to be the center of my own universe,

The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order...

That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.

The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.

Masochism is a valuable job skill.

Maybe it’s our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.

We don’t see a lot of models for male social interaction. There’s sports and barn raisings.

A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.

Every author has to eventually write a food book.

I don’t care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.

Scratching Yogi’s ears Michelle says ‘That’s just part of his job, the comforting. That’s what I mean by the bhatisvata. That he’s more concerned with comforting and helping, even more than his own well-being.” This...

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

A girl calls and asks, “Does it hurt very much to die?””Well, sweetheart,” I tell her, “yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.

Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they’d leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a...

Sex pretty much cures everything.

Prepare to evacuate soul in five, in four, three, two, one.

When you understand, that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past...

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher.

… the first step to eternal live is you have to die.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.

Since September 11, 2001, the real world has become too scary for a lot of people to be with – all the time.

The bright future is that readers are accepting more varied forms of stories.

My goal is more to be remembered. They’ll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they’ll read my books.

The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy...

You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is...

The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.

Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in...

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they...

Believe in me and you shall die, forever.

It’s not love or anything, but I think I like you, too.

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.