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.

You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap. We’re all singing, all dancing crap of...

Wszystko zgodnie z sugestiami mojej mamy. W następnym tygodniu zaczynam zapisywać rozmaite szczegóły. […] Najlepsi ludzie piją whiskey, mówi.

Make me into anything, but just love me.

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at...

The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like...

Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only...

The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.

It’s obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O’Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing...

For years now, I’ve wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.

After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake… This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

Jack Palance was my distant uncle – that’s the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become...

The answer is there is no answer.

I’ve always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they’re reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They’re conflicted by the idea that they don’t know what’s next....

Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people’s defenses.

Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion… What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.

First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.

After fight club you’re so relaxed, you just cannot care.

If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?’Clawing at the roof of her coffin.

The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don’t participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and...

Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby.

How she looks is watered-down.How she looks is disappearing.How she looks is erased.”Don’t stress”, she says. “This is just me not wearing any makeup.

Isn’t a kid alive who doesn’t dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.

Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded–the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]

Put the gun to my head and paint walls with my brains.

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.

The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.

Nobody’s told me anything to date that I’ve been completely reviled by.

At the age of 31, I realized, ‘Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.’

Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it’s not the king any more.

Sometimes, like in ‘Invisible Monsters,’ I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

I write nothing but contemporary romances.

In my family, we can’t just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.

Death is a long process,” Archer says. “Your body is just the first part of you that croaks.” Meaning: Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. And your anger about investing a...

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.

In capitalist nation, all is decided by money.

You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

Listening, it occurred to Randall that the love people feel for animals is the purest form of love. Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something...