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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.

-Chuck Palahniuk

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Any 'artist' Makes A

Chuck Palahniuk

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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.

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Seek Midday Nourishment. Visit Memorial Acclaimed War Hero Colonel Sanders.

I Would Say Any Behavior That Is Not The Status Quo Is Interpreted As Insanity, When, In Fact, It Might Actually Be Enlightenment. Insanity Is Sorta In The Eye Of The Beholder.

At This Rate, We'll Never Get To The Future.

Most Guys Will Fight To Know You. Some Guys Will Deny You're A Real Person, And Some Will Just Ignore You." The Zealot. The Atheist. The Agnostic.

Most Times, It's Just A Lot Easier Not To Let The World Know What's Wrong.

Everyone Thinks Their Whole Life Should Be At Least As Much Fun As Masturbation.

Rant Casey Used To Say, "no Matter What Happens, It's Always Now..." Talk About Cryptic. I Think What Rant Meant Was, We Live In The Present Moment Of Reality, And No Matter What's Come Before, No Matter How Much We Loved A Person Or A Dog, When It Attacks Us We'll React To That Moment Of Danger.

I'm Working Harder Than I Have Ever Worked In My Entire Life, But What The Hell, My Life Is My Job Now, And My Job Is My Life And That's The Way It Should Be.

What You Have To Consider Is The Possibility That God Doesn't Like You. Could Be, God Hates Us. This Is Not The Worst Thing That Could Happen.

Without Just One Nest A Bird Can Call The World Home Life Is Your Career

You Kill Strangers Deliberately So You Don't Accidentally Kill The People You Love.

I Have A Lot Of Money.

Proof That No Investment Is Yours Forever.

But If You Tell Folks You're A College Student, Folks Are So Impressed. You Can Be A Student In Anything And Not Have To Know Anything. Just Say Toxicology Or Marine Biokinesis, And The Person You're Talking To Will Change The Subject To Himself. If This Doesn't Work, Mention The Neural Synapses Of Embryonic Pigeons.

I Realized That My Book Readings Were Boring Me. I Was Going To Go Up There And Read A Passage And Sleepwalk Through The Whole Event And I Needed To Make It More Interesting. I Wanted To Be Running And Jumping And Do Something So That The Event Would Be So Exciting. I Had To Trick Myself Into Having Fun Every Time.

I Believe In Something. But I Don't Believe That Anything Can Hold A Grudge For Long Enough To Condemn Its Creation To Eternal Punishment. Nobody Can Hold A Grudge That Long, Even God.

You Realize That There's No Point In Doing Anything If Nobody's Watching. You Wonder, If There Had Been A Low Turnout At The Crucifixion, Would They Have Rescheduled?

With The Novels, I Usually Start From Something In My Own Life That I Can't Resolve, So I Turn It Into A Metaphor And For Months Or Sometimes Years I'll Exhaust All Of My Emotional Reaction To This Issue By Making It Enormous On The Page.

All Human Beings Search For Either Reasons To Be Good, Or Excuses To Be Bad.

The Lower You Fall, The Higher You'll Fly. The Farther You Run, The More God Wants You Back.

That's How A Good Story Works. It Changes How You Feel. It Brings You To A Greater Appreciation, A Greater Joy, Of Your Own Existence.

On A Night Without Moon Or Stars You Can't See A Thing, But You Can Imagine Anything.

There's No Escaping Fate, It Just Keeps Going. Day And Night, The Future Just Keeps Coming At You.

Anytime My Work Can Coax Bodily Fluids Out Of Someone, I'm Happy.

Because After You've Crossed Some Lines, You Just Keep Crossing Them. And There's No Escaping From Constant Escape. Distracting Ourselves. Avoiding Confrontation. Getting Past The Moment. Jacking Off. Television. Denial.

Stanislavski Was Right, You Can Find Fresh Pain Every Time You Discover What You Pretty Much Already Know.

We're The Culture That Cried Wolf.

Alternating The Thoughtful Task Of Writing With The Mindless Work Of Laundry Or Dish Washing Will Give You The Breaks You Need For New Ideas And Insights To Occur. If You Don't Know What Comes Next In The Story... Clean Your Toilet. Change The Bed Sheets. For Christ Sakes, Dust The Computer. A Better Idea Will Come.

You're A Product Just As Much. A Product Of A Product. The People Who Design Cars, They're Products, Your Teachers, Products. The Minister In Your Church, Another Product.

Stop The Excessive Shopping And Masturbation. Quit Your Job. Start A Fight. Prove You're Alive. If You Don't Claim Your Humanity, You Will Become A Statistic.

I Am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed, Sense Of Rejection.

When You're Thinking About The Rest Of Your Life, You're Never Really Thinking More Than A Couple Years Down The Road.

Some Writers Research In Order To Write. I Write In Order To Research Topics That Interest Me. Especially If I Can Meet With Other People, In Forums From Illness Support Groups To Phone-sex Hotlines, And Learn What Other People Know Best.

Optimism Is The First Symptom That Any Disease Is Fatal.

If You Don't Know What You Want, You End Up With A Lot You Don't.

Nothing Was Solved When The Fight Was Over, But Nothing Mattered.

Fight Club Book

Fight Club Novel

Nothing Is Static. Even The Mona Lisa Is Falling Apart. Since Fight Club, I Can Wiggle Half The Teeth In My Jaw. Maybe Self-improvement Isn't The Answer. Maybe Self-destruction Is The Answer.

By The Time You Read This, You'll Be Older Than You Remember.

The Bad News Is We Don't Have Any Control. The Good News Is We Can't Make Any Mistakes.

Some People Are Just Born Human, The Rest Of Us, We Take A Lifetime To Get There.

You're Not Getting This Back You Know. Consider It An Asshole Tax.

The Problem With Every Story Is You Tell It After The Fact.

What Kind Of Dining Set Defines Me As A Person?

For This Moment, Nothing Matters. Look Up Into The Stars And You're Gone.

The Moment The World Declares A Person To Be Immortal, At That Moment The Person Will Strive To Prove The World Wrong. In The Face Of Glowing Press Releases And Reviews The Most Heralded Women Starve Themselves Or Cut Themselves Or Poison Themselves. Or They Find A Man Who's Happy To Do That For Him.

There Are Bodies Buried Everywhere You Just Have To Know Where To Look.

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.

Because I Can't Hit Bottom, I Can't Be Saved.

You Could Stab A Knife Right Through My Heart And You'd Be Too Late.

Did You Ever Think About Life As A Metaphor For Television?

I Write Because It's A Way Of Presenting Something Without Having To Be There.

So Often With Beginning Writers, The Story That They Want To Start With Is The Most Important Story Of Their Life - My Molestation, My This, My Horrible Drug Addiction - They Want To Tell That Most Important Story, And They Don't Have The Skills To Tell It Yet, So It Ends Up Becoming A Comedy. A Powerful Story Told Poorly Becomes Funny, It Just Makes People Laugh Behind Their Hands.

The Government Says Rant's Alive Because They Need A Villain. The Kids Say He's Alive Because They Need A Hero.

I Have A Secret Goal With My Editor - He Has Asthma And Uses His Inhaler, And After I Send Him A New Manuscript, I'll Have His Assistant Phone Me And Tell Me How Many Times He Had To Get His Inhaler Out While Reading A Draft. It's My Secret Laugh Meter.

Because Nothing Is As Perfect As You Can Imagine It.

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.

Picture Anybody Growing Up So Stupid He Didn't Know That Hope Is Just Another Phase You'll Grow Out Of.

Deliver Me From Swedish Furniture. Deliver Me From Clever Art. And The Phone Rang And Tyler Answered. "if You Don't Know What You Want," The Doorman Said, "you End Up With A Lot You Don't." May I Never Be Complete. May I Never Be Content. May I Never Be Perfect. Deliver Me, Tyler, From Being Perfect And Complete.

I'm Giving You My Life To Prove To Myself I Can, I Really Can Love Somebody. Even When I'm Not Getting Paid, I Can Give Love And Happiness And Charm. You See, I Can Handle The Baby Food And The Not Talking And Being Homeless And Invisible, But I Have To Know That I Can Love Somebody. Completely And Totally, Permanently And Without Hope Of Reward, Just As An Act Of Will, I Will Love Somebody.

It Seems That So Much Writing Is Being Done In The Nineteenth-century Model, Where Every Connection Has To Be Thoroughly Explained.

Oh Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me. I'll Be Anybody You Want Me To Be.

More And More People Are Defining Themselves Not By What They Are About, But By What They Are Against, What They Are Overcoming, The Thing That Is Wrong With Them.

Find Out What You're Afraid Of And Go Live There.

There Are People Out There Who Will Not Read Books, But Somehow They'll Read My Books.

In Light This Bright, After So Long In The Dark, Everything We Can See Is Only Black And White. Only Glaring Shape-outlines We Have To Blink Against.

Black And White

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 Right Through The Moments Where You Should've Been Paying Attention. Well, Get Used To That Feeling. That's How Your Whole Life Will Feel Some Day.

I Know That When A Supersexy Older Girl With Hips And Breasts And Nice Hair Wants To Take Off Your Glasses And To Paint You A Smoky Eye She's Merely Trying To Enroll You In A Beauty Contest She's Already Won. It's A Kind Of Slummy, Condescending Gesture, Like When Rich People Ask Poor People Where They Summer. To Me, This Smacks Of A Blatant, Insensitive "let Them Eat Cake" Type Of Chauvinism.

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 Her Coffin.

I'm Not So Much A Good Friend As I'm The Savior Who Wants You To Worship Him Forever.

Of All The Priceless Objects Left Behind, This Is What We Rescue. These Artifacts. Memory Cues. Useless Souvenirs. Nothing You Could Auction. The Scars Left From Happiness.

It's So Hard To Forget Pain, But It's Even Harder To Remember Sweetness. We Have No Scar To Show For Happiness. We Learn So Little From Peace.

I Admire Addicts. In A World Where Everybody Is Waiting For Some Blind, Random Disaster Or Some Sudden Disease, The Addict Has The Comfort Of Knowing What Will Most Likely Wait For Him Down The Road. He's Taken Some Control Over His Ultimate Fate, And His Addiction Keeps The Cause Of His Death From Being A Total Surprise.

Because Everything Up To Now Is A Story And Everything After Now Is A Story.

Emotionally, In Our Minds, We Get So Filled With Resentments Where We've Got A Story About Absolutely Everything.

Sex Pretty Much Cures Everything.

According To Plato, We Don't Learn Anything. Our Soul Has Lived So Many Lives That We Know Everything. Teachers And Education Can Only Remind Us Of What We Already Know.

If Your Body Is A Temple, You Can Pile Up Too Much Deferred Maintenance. If Your Body Is A Temple, Mine Was A Real Fixer-upper.

Jump Way Back To One Time, Evie And Me Did This Fashion Shoot In A Junk Yard, In A Slaughterhouse, In A Mortuary. We'd Go Anywhere To Look Good By Comparison, And What I Realize Is Mostly What I Hate About Evie Is The Fact That She's So Vain And Stupid And Needy. But What I Hate Most Is How She's Just Like Me. What I Really Hate Is Me So I Hate Pretty Much Everybody.

Here Are The Shadows Left Behind By A Thousand Moments, A Thousand Moods, Of Needs Traced Here On The Wall By Men Who Are Gone. Here Is The Record Of Their Being Here.

We All Want To Explain Ourselves. Nobody Wants To Be Forgotten.

The World Is The Cradle And Your Trap.

There Are The Most Fantastic, Beautiful Things And People Out There. It’s Up To You To Find Them.

I Need To Rebel Against Myself. It's The Opposite Of Following Your Bliss. I Need To Do What I Most Fear.

Believe In Yourself

It's Not Enough To Be Numbered With The Grains Of Sand On The Beach And The Stars In The Sky.

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.

If Anything I Try To Write Something That Would Be More Difficult To Film. I Tend To See Film As Competition And Would Like Instead To Do What Books Do Best.

The Same As Real Life, There Is No Happily Ever After.

If You Flee From The Things You Fear, There's No Resolution.

In Truth, The Degree Of Anyone's Success Depends On How Often They Can Say The Word Yes And Hear The Word No.

When Deep Space Exploration Ramps Up, It'll Be The Corporations That Name Everything, The Ibm Stellar Sphere, The Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

Anymore, No One's Mind Is Their Own.

Katherine Kenton Remains Among The Generation Of Women Who Feel That The Most Sincere Form Of Flattery Is The Male Erection.

Now Is The Autumn Of Our Ennui.

When Did The Future Switch From Being A Promise To A Threat?

The Only Biodiversity We're Going To Have Left Is Coke Versus Pepsi. We're Landscaping The Whole World One Stupid Mistake At A Time.

I Want My Whole Life Lined With A Topical Anesthetic.

What You See At Fight Club Is A Generation Of Men Raised By Women.

What We Think Of As Halloween Is Really The Product Of Media Barons, City Mayors, And Candy-makers. You Know, Before The 1920s, Halloween Was Really A Terrible, Terrible Night.

Still, It's Nice To Have One Person Who Knows All Your Secrets.

You Tell Yourself That Noise Is What Defines Silence. Without Noise, Silence Would Not Be Golden. Noise Is The Exception.

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.

People Didn't Know Who I Was Or Why I Was There, So They Started Inventing Stories About Me. I Was A Registered Sex Offender And I'd Just Been Released From Prison And Was Being Forced To Do Community-service Work. I Was A Murderer, An Arsonist - All These Horrific Things Had Been Projected On Me Because No One Knew What To Make Of This White Guy Who Showed Up And Made Toast At 5 O'clock Every Morning.

Our Real Discoveries Come From Chaos.

Invisible Monsters

Hope Is Something Really Tough And Tenacious You Have To Give Up. It’s An Addiction To Break.

Las Vegas Looks The Way You'd Imagine Heaven Must Look At Night.

Think Of A Rock Polisher, One Of Those Drums, Goes Round And Round, Rolls Twenty-four/seven, Full Of Water And Rocks And Gravel. Grinding It All Up. Round And Round. Polishing Those Ugly Rocks Into Gemstones. That’s The Earth. Why It Goes Around. We’re The Rocks. And What Happens To Us—the Drama And Pain And Joy And War And Sickness And Victory And Abuse—why, That’s Just The Water And Sand To Erode Us. Grind Us Down. To Polish Us Up, Nice And Bright.

Ask Yourself: What Did I Eat For Breakfast Today? What Did I Eat For Dinner Last Night? You See How Fast Reality Fades Away?

It's Not Love Or Anything, But I Think I Like You, Too.

The Photographer In My Head Says: Give Me Peace. Flash. Give Me Release. Flash.

We Have Pain And Hate And Love And Joy And War In The World Because We Want Them.

To See How Boring You Really Are, Write A Book About Soap And Cults, And The Profits You Make Will Be Your Only Means Of Subsistence.

With A Gun Barrel Between Your Teeth, You Speak Only In Vowels.

...no Way Could I Fall In Love. I Just Couldn't Go There Yet. Settle For Less. I Didn't Want To Process Through Anything. I Didn't Want To Pick Up Any Pieces. Lower My Expectations.

Falling In Love

If I Turn Up Suicided In The Morning, It Was Murder.

Everything Is A Self-portrait. A Diary. Your Whole Drug History’s In A Strand Of Your Hair. Your Fingernails. The Forensic Details. The Lining Of Your Stomach Is A Document. The Calluses On Your Hand Tell All Your Secrets. Your Teeth Give You Away. Your Accent. The Wrinkles Around Your Mouth And Eyes. Everything You Do Shows Your Hand.

How You're Still Always Trapped. How Your Head Is The Cave, Your Eyes The Cave Mouth. How You Live Inside Your Head And Only See What You Want. How You Only Watch The Shadows And Make Up Your Own Meaning.

The Rules That I Adhere To Are The Rules Of Minimalism. And Those Rules Kind Of Force Writing To Be More Filmic... To Have The Immediacy And Accessibility Of Film So That The Reader Really Has To Fill In A Lot Of The Details.

Schools Of Science And Physics Replacing Each Other At A Faster And Faster Rate. Just The Nature Of Our World Is Constant Revision, Constant...negation Of Previous Beliefs, And So...the Whole World Is A Twist Ending. Every Week Is A Twist Ending.

In A World Where Billions Believe Their Deity Conceived A Mortal Child With A Virgin Human, It's Stunning How Little Imagination Most People Display.

Everybody's Still Miserable In The Same Way They've Always Been Miserable, And More And More Of My Friends - Especially My Male Friends - Find Themselves Taking Anti-anxiety, Psychotropic Drugs. It Seems Like Everybody I Know Is Wondering If They're Really Who They Are, Or Once The Prescription Runs Out, Will They Become Someone Different?

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 Tiger Can Smile A Snake Will Say It Loves You Lies Make Us Evil

Having Nothing To Lose Is The New Wealth.

Nothing To Lose

This Is Why I Loved The Support Groups So Much, If People Thought You Were Dying, They Gave You Their Full Attention. If This Might Be The Last Time They Saw You, They Really Saw You. Everything Else About Their Checkbook Balance And Radio Songs And Messy Hair Went Out The Window. You Had Their Full Attention. People Listened Instead Of Just Waiting For Their Turn To Speak. And When They Spoke, They Weren't Just Telling You A Story. When The Two Of You Talked, You Were Building Something, And Afterward You Were Both Different Than Before.

You Have To Jump Into Disaster With Both Feet.

Invisible Monsters

Abortion Occurs So Frequently In My Stories. Abortion Sort Of Synthesizes Both Sex And Death. To Have Sex And Death Placed As Close To One Another As Possible Is Always A Goal Of Mine.

You Spend Your Entire Life Becoming God And Then You Die.

Invisible Monsters

I Am A Writer And The Greatest Compliment I Can Get Is To Know That I've Contributed Language To The Culture, That I've Defined Something, Given It A Name. So I Think That Is One Of The Great Things A Writer Can Do.

That’s How A Scary Story Works. It Echoes Some Ancient Fear. It Re-creates Some Forgotten Terror. Something We’d Like To Think We’ve Grown Beyond. But It Can Still Scare Us To Tears. It’s Something You’d Hoped Was Healed.

When You're An Addict, You Can Go Without Feeling Anything Except Drunk Or Stoned Or Hungry. Still, When You Compare This To Other Feelings, To Sadness, Anger, Fear, Worry, Despair, And Depression, Well, An Addiction No Longer Looks So Bad. It Looks Like A Very Viable Option.

With My Eyes Closed, I Ask If She Knows How This Will All Turn Out. "long-term Or Short-term?" She Asks. Both. "long-term," She Says, "we're All Going To Die. Then Our Bodies Will Rot. No Surprise There. Short-term, We're Going To Live Happily Ever After." Really? "really," She Says. "so Don't Sweat It.

Worker Bees Can Leave. Even Drones Can Fly Away. The Queen Is Their Slave.

In A World Where Vows Are Worthless.where Making A Pledge Means Nothing. Where Promises Are Made To Be Broken, It Would Be Nice To See Words Come Back Into Power.

First Your Parents, They Give You Your Life, But Then They Try To Give You Their Life.

It's So Quiet This High Up, The Feeling You Get Is That You're One Of Those Space Monkeys. You Do The Little Job You're Trained To Do. Pull A Lever. Push A Button. You Don't Understand Any Of It, And Then You Just Die.

We All Have Some Proper Noun To Blame.

Let Me Be The Ring Leader In Your Guilt Gang-bang.

In All Probability The Human Genome Project Will, Someday, Find That I Carry Some Recessive Gene For Optimism, Because Despite All My Best Efforts I Still Can't Scrape Together Even A Couple Days Of Hopelessness. Future Scientists Will Call It The Pollyanna Syndrome, And If Forced To Guess, I'd Say That Mine Has Been A Way-long Case History Of Chasing Rainbows.

Chasing Rainbows

And The Seventh Rule Is If This Is Your First Night At Fight Club, You Have To Fight.

We Come From A Generation Of People Who Need Their Tv Or Stereo Playing All The Time. These People So Scared Of Silence. These Soundaholics, These Quietophobics.

You Must Realize That One Day You Will Die. Until Then You Are Worthless.

The Things You Used To Own, Now They Own You.

Fight Club Book

This Was Freedom. Losing All Hope Was Freedom.

Fight Club Book

Fight Club Novel

Narrator: You Had To Give It To Him: He Had A Plan. And It Started To Make Sense, In A Tyler Sort Of Way. No Fear. No Distractions. The Ability To Let That Which Does Not Matter Truly Slide.

Nothing Happened, And Nothing Kept Happening.

The Gyms You Go To Are Crowded With Guys Trying To Look Like Men, As If Being A Man Means Looking The Way A Sculptor Or An Art Director Says.

I Am An Invisible Monster, And I Am Incapable Of Loving Anybody. You Don't Know Which Is Worse.

Pretty Much Always. We Need To Tell The Story Of Our Life To Someone.

Don't Write About Your Most Emotionally Charged Moment As A Learning Thing.

A Minute Of Perfection Was Worth The Effort. A Moment Was The Most You Could Ever Expect From Perfection.

Fertility Says, "can You Relax And Just Let Things Happen?" I Ask, Does She Mean, Like Disasters, Like Pain, Like Misery? Can I Just Let All That Happen? "and Joy," She Says, "and Serenity, And Happiness, And Contentment." She Says All The Wings Of The Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "you Don't Have To Control Everything," She Says. "you Can't Control Everything." But You Can Be Ready For Disaster. A Sign Goes By Saying, Buckle Up. "if You Worry About Disaster All Of The Time, That's What You Are Going To Get," Fertility Says.

If You Ask Me, Most People Have Children Just As Their Own Enthusiasm About Life Begins To Wane.

Picture The Moment When Your Mom And Dad First Saw You As Something Other Than A Pretty, Tiny Version Of Them. You As Them, But Improved. Better Educated. Innocent. Then Picture When You Stopped Being Their Dream.

If The Living Are Haunted By The Dead, Then The Dead Are Haunted By Their Own Mistakes.

Some People Still Think Knowledge Is Power.

Knowledge Is Power

I Spent My Life Attacking Everything Because I Was Too Afraid To Risk Creating Anything.

A Shadow Of A Reflection Of An Image Of An Illusion.

I Don't Want To Die Without Any Scars.

This Wasn't Any Mere Song And Dance; Here Was A Bold, Blaring Declaration Howling Itself Into The Empty Face Of Death.

Doesn't Reincarnation Strike You As Just Another Form Of Procrastination?

Procrastination

It’s A Fun Playtime. Please, Don’t Kill It With Big Words.

If People Thought You Were Dying, They Gave You Their Full Attention.

You See, Life Only Turns Out Good Or Bad For Only A Little Bit. And Then It Turns Out Some Other Way.

A Writer’s Job Is To Cultivate What Can Go Wrong.

Everyone Smiles With That Invisible Gun To Their Head.

A Certain Number Of People Have To Live Their Lives Outdoors Between 8 A.m. And 8 P.m., And A Certain Number Of People Can Only Leave Their Homes Between 8 P.m. And 8 A.m. So Basically, Public Life Has To Be Lived In These Shifts, In Order For Everyone To Fit On The Streets Because There's Just No More Room For Any More Infrastructure, Any More Highways. So It Polarizes The Community Into Day People And Night People, And It Becomes Sort Of A Metaphor For Racism And Classism.

The Strength Of Film Is Its Accessibility And Immediacy. But The Strength Of Books Is That Freedom To Really Depict Anything You Want Because People Are Going To Be Reading It In Private. So, I'm Always Trying To Write With The Immediacy And The Constant Motion Of Film But I'm Also Trying To Write With The Complete Freedom Of Subject Matter That Books Have.

The Future Is Just Wasted On Some People.

Invisible Monsters

I Tagged A First-timer One Night At Fight Club. That Saturday Night, A Young Guy With An Angel’s Face Came To His First Fight Club, And I Tagged Him For A Fight. That’s The Rule. If It’s Your First Night In Fight Club, You Have To Fight. I Knew That So I Tagged Him Because The Insomnia Was On Again, And I Was In A Mood To Destroy Something Beautiful.

Imagine A Plague You Catch Through Your Ears.

Me With Nothing Left To Lose, Plotting My Big Revenge In The Spotlight. Give Me Violent Revenge Fantasies As A Coping Mechanism.

Coping Mechanisms

About My Boss, Tyler Tells Me, If I'm Really Angry, I Should Go To The Post Office And Fill Out A Change-of-address Card And Have All His Mail Forwarded To Rugby, North Dakota.

My Books Do Have A Sort Of Romantic Community At The End - People Coming Together. But On A More Basic Level, I Always See Them As Being About Power, In The Same Way That Harry Potter Books Are Pitched To A Population Of Young People Who Really Have No Power.

It's All Mirror, Mirror On The Wall Because Beauty Is Power The Same Way Money Is Power The Same Way A Gun Is Power.

In Good Old Colonial Dunsboro, Masochism Is A Valuable Job Skill. It Is In Most Jobs.

You Know How They Say You Only Hurt The Ones You Love? Well, It Works Both Ways.

People Would Ask Me To Autograph Their Bodies And Then The Next Time I'd See Them On Tour They'd Have My Autograph Tattooed. I Decided I Wouldn't Write On People Anymore, But I'd Give Them Arms And Legs And If They Wanted Those Autographed I'd Do That.

Generations Have Been Working In Jobs They Hate, Just So They Can Buy What They Don't Really Need.

Isn't A Kid Alive Who Doesn't Dream About Rewarding Her Folks, Or Punishing Them.

What If Reality Is Nothing But Some Disease?

The Money Is In Television. Books Are Not The Dominant Medium Of Our Time, So Fewer People Will Create Them. In A Sad Way, Books Have Become A Form Of "comfort Food" We Expect To Lull Us To Sleep.

Every High School Has Its Romeo And Juliet, One Tragic Couple. So Does Every Generation.

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 Is Going To Be About.

Really, Just Looking Around, You Feel A Twinge Of Pity For The Poor Souls Who Succeeded In Getting Past The Pearly Gates. One Can't Help But Picture The Lackluster Vip Lounge In Heaven, A Kind Of Nonalcoholic Ice-cream Social Starring Harriet Beecher Stowe And Mahatma Gandhi. Hardly Anyone's Idea Of A "with-it" Social Register.

Cults Make People Sing So Hard For So Long - Because It Over-oxygenates The Blood And Sets Them Up To Faint.

You Think Maybe If You Just Work Harder And Faster, You Can Hold Off The Chaos, But Then One Day You’re Changing A Patio Light Bulb With A Five-year Life Span And You Realize How You’ll Only Be Changing This Light Maybe Ten More Times Before You’ll Be Dead.

When You Reach The End Of Your Life - Trust Me, You Won't Look Back And Savor The Moments You Spent Alone.

My Whole Life Is About Forgetting. It's My Most Valuable Job Skill.

For Thousands Of Years, Human Beings Had Screwed Up And Trashed And Crapped On This Planet, And Now History Expected Me To Clean Up After Everyone. I Have To Wash Out And Flatten My Soup Cans. And Account For Every Drop Of Used Motor Oil. And I Have To Foot The Bill For Nuclear Waste And Buried Gasoline Tanks And Landfilled Toxic Sludge Dumped A Generation Before I Was Born.

After You Find Out All The Things That Can Go Wrong, Your Life Becomes Less About Living And More About Waiting.

I Hate How On Tv They Have To Fill So Many Minutes. It Means They Have To Put In Anything, And By Doing So They Sort Of Trivialize News; News Becomes This Commodity That They Need To Fill Dead Time Between Commercials With.

Yes, I Kidnapped That Lindberg Baby.

The Only Reason Why We Ask Other People How Their Weekend Was Is So We Can Tell Them About Our Own Weekend.

A Moment Is All You Can Expect From Perfection.

Someone Bent On Suicide Won't Have Much Sense Of Humor Left.

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 Bit Homeless.

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 Regulated, With Everyone Tested And Registered And Adressed And Recorded. Nobody Had Left Much Room For Adventure, Except Maybe The Kind You Could Buy. [...] The Laws That Keep Us Safe, These Same Laws Condemn Us To Boredom.

I Went To Sexaholics Anonymous For Six Months. For Research. I Wanted To See The Structure Of The Groups, How They Were Conducted, And What The Atmosphere Was Like, And Also To Be Able To Describe The People As Human Beings, Rather Than As The Dirty Jokes That They Are In Our Culture.

I'm Always Trying To Reach A Transcendent Point, A Romantic Point, But Reach It In A Really Unconventional Way, A Really Profane Way. To Get To That Romantic, Touching, Heartbreaking Place, But Through A Lot Of Acts Of Profanity.

You Don’t Care Where I Live Or How I Feel, Or What I Eat Or How I Feed My Kids Or How I Pay The Doctor If I Get Sick, And Yes I Am Stupid And Bored And Weak, But I Am Still Your Responsibility.

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