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People Who Don't Want To Get On With Their Lives, And Don't Want To Accept Responsibility For The Direction Of Their Lives Want To Hang Out With Other People Who Don't Want To Accept Responsibility Or Move On, And So You Find That Your Entire Culture Around You Are People Who Are Just Like You, Because That's What's Comforting.

-Chuck Palahniuk

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People Who Don't Want

Chuck Palahniuk

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People Who Don't Want To Get On With Their Lives, And Don't Want To Accept Responsibility For The Direction Of Their Lives Want To Hang Out With Other People Who Don't Want To Accept Responsibility Or Move On, And So You Find That Your Entire Culture Around You Are People Who Are Just Like You, Because That's What's Comforting.

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Idiot People Like Angel Delaporte Who Look For A Supernatural Reason For Ordinary Events, Those People Drive Misty Nuts.

I Am Nothing, And Not Even That.

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

My Books Are More About People Experimenting With Different Identities And Social Models In A Short-term Way Before They Can Break Through To Something Authentic.

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.

Regret, Daisy Knew, Was The Only Confirmation Of A Well-lived Life. If You Didn't Occasionally Go Too Far, You Weren't Going Anywhere.

Recycling And Speed Limits Are Bullshit. They're Like Someone Who Quits Smoking On His Deathbed.

Those Who Can Forget The Past Are Way Ahead Of The Rest Of Us.

Forget The Past

I'm Really Glad That I Made A Lot Of Mistakes, Poorly Chose My Friends Throughout My Twenties, And Didn't Have A Rocket Trajectory That Set Me On One Path Without Making Any Mistakes Or Having Any Setbacks. The Older I Get, The More I Realize That It's All Of These Failed, Horrible Things From My Past, And The Stories That They Generated, That Are The Things I Will Draw On For The Rest Of My Life.

Anymore, No One's Mind Is Their Own.

The First Rule Of Fight Club Is You Don't Talk About Fight Club.

A Male Chauvinist Pig Isn't Born, He's Made, And More And More Of Them Are Being Made By Women.

You Humiliate A Rich Person And They're Still Rich. You Humiliate A Brilliant Person And They're Still Smart. A Person Who Is Well Connected Is Still The King Of England. But If You Humiliate A Young Person, You Take Away The Only Form Of Power They Have.

Everyone Wants To Be Tested And Challenged. Everyone Would Like A Good, Honest Fight To Exhaust Their Frustrations.

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

Everything Is A Self-portrait. Everything Is A Diary.

The Trick To Forgetting The Big Picture Is To Look At Everything Close-up. The Shortcut To Closing A Door Is To Bury Yourself In The Details. This Is How We Must Look To God. As If Everything's Fine.

She's So Thin She's Either Dying Or Rich.

I Let Go. Lost In Oblivion. Dark And Silent And Complete. I Found Freedom. Losing All Hope Was Freedom.

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.

I Think America Is Just So In Love With Conflict.

No Matter How Bad Things Get, You Can Still Walk Away.

The Lucky Ones Are Just Born Dead.

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 Yourself.

Why Is It You Feel Like A Dope If You Laugh Alone, But That's Usually How You End Up Crying?

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

Inspiration Needs Disease, Injury, Madness.

If Marilyn Monroe Was Alive Right Now, What Would She Be Doing?' Clawing At The Roof Of Her Coffin.

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

No Matter How Many Luxuries You Get, Something Will Be Missing. No Matter How Carefully You Choose, You'll Never Be Totally Happy.

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.

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

That's What I Love About Fire, How It Would Kill Me As Quick As Anybody Else. How It Can't Know I'm Its Mother. It's So Beautiful And Powerful And Beyond Feeling Anything For Anybody, That's What I Love About Fire.

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

Our Real Discoveries Come From Chaos, From Going To The Place That Looks Wrong And Stupid And Foolish.

People Don't Listen, They Just Wait For Their Turn To Talk.

Everyone's In Their Own Personal Coma.

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.

There Is Nothing Special In The World. Nothing Magic. Just Physics.

You Become Smart When You Don't Need To Quote Someone Anymore." I Am Still Stupid: I Quoted Chuck Palahiniuk

Beginning With Santa In Infancy, And Ending With The Tooth Fairy As The Child Acquires Adult Teeth. Or, Plainly Put, Beginning With All The Possibility Of Childhood, And Ending With An Absolute Trust In The National Currency.

Her Mom And Dad Are Both Doctors And Want Her To Follow Her Dream, Not Turn Out The Way They Have, No Matter How Much It Costs Them.

Yeah. Well. Whatever. You Can't Teach God Anything.

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I Try To Get Centered: Watching White Moon Face The Stars Never Feel Anger Blah, Blah, Blah, The End

So Here I Am. This Is As Good As It Gets. Take It Or Leave It.

Good As It Gets

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.

If A Tree Falls In The Forest And Nobody Is There To Hear It, Doesn't It Just Lie There And Rot?

No Fear. No Distractions. The Ability To Let That Which Does Not Matter Truly Slide.

Nobody Wants To Worship You If You Have The Same Problems, The Same Bad Breath And Messy Hair And Hangnails, As A Regular Person. You Have To Be Everything Regular People Aren’t. Where They Fail, You Have To Go All The Way. Be What People Are Too Afraid To Be. Become Whom They Admire. People Shopping For A Messiah Want Quality. Nobody Is Going To Follow A Loser. When It Comes To Choosing A Savior, They Won't Settle For Just A Human Being.

Demon Or Angel Or Evil Spirit, I Just Need Something To Show Itself. Ghoulie Or Ghosty Or Long-legged Beastie, I Just Want My Hand Held.

You're A Product Of Our Language, And How Our Laws Are And How We Believe Our God Wants Us. Every Bitty Molecule About You Has Already Been Thought Out By Some Million People Before You. Anything You Can Do Is Boring And Old And Perfectly Okay. You're Safe Because You're So Trapped Inside Your Culture. Anything You Can Conceive Of Is Fine Because You Can Conceive Of It. You Can't Imagine Any Way To Escape. There's No Way You Can Get Out.the World Is Your Cradle And Your Trap.

We Want You, Not Your Money. As Long As You're At Fight Club, You're Not How Much Money You've Got In The Bank. You're Not Your Job. You're Not Your Family, And You're Not Who You Tell Yourself. You're Not Your Name. You're Not Your Problems. You're Not Your Age. You Are Not Your Hopes. You Will Not Be Saved. We Are All Going To Die, Someday.

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

Invisible Monsters

I Didn't Use Anybody's Story. I Used The Context And The Structure Of The Situation. People Were So, So Desperate To Tell Their Story And Begin To Digest Their Experience - Like Turning It Into A Story - That After The Fist Few Weeks I Could Go With A Pad And Pencil And Take Notes. People Didn't Seem At All Bothered By That.

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.

What You Forget When You're Planning A Hijack By Yourself Is Somewhere Along The Line, You Might Need To Neglect Your Hostages Just Long Enough So You Can Use The Bathroom.

What I Mean Is Sometimes, For An Artist, Chronic Pain Can Be A Gift.

They Should Let Some People Into The Library By Prescription Only

You Have To Keep Recycling Yourself.

At First, The New Owner Pretends He Never Looked At The Living Room Floor.

The Joke Is, We All Have The Same Punchline.

Maybe The Truth Is I Really Want To Like You Instead.

I Want You To Invent It. I Want You To Have That Skill. To Create Your Own Reality. Your Own Set Of Laws. I Want To Try And Teach You That.

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.

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

There's An Opposite To Déjà Vu. They Call It Jamais Vu. It's When You Meet The Same People Or Visit Places, Again And Again, But Each Time Is The First. Everybody Is Always A Stranger. Nothing Is Ever Familiar.

Because Nothing Is As Good As You Can Imagine It. No One Is As Beautiful As She Is In Your Head. Nothing Is As Exciting As Your Fantasy.

We All Have This Moment, When Your Folks First See You As Someone Not Growing Up To Be Them.

Hello! Look At Me. Hello! I Am So Zen. This Is Blood. This Is Nothing. Hello. Everything Is Nothing, And It's So Cool To Be Enlightened. Like Me.

Sex Pretty Much Cures Everything.

Marla Tells Me How In The Wild You Don't See Old Animals Because As Soon As They Age, Animals Die. If They Get Sick Or Slow Down, Something Stronger Kills Them. Animals Aren't Meant To Get Old. Marla Lies Down On Her Bed And Undoes The Tie On Her Bathrobe, And Says Our Culture Has Made Death Something Wrong. Old Animals Should Be An Unnatural Exception. Freaks.

Rant Said That View Of Time Was Set Up So Folks Won't Live Forever. It's The Planned Obsolescence We've All Agreed To...'nothing Says You Have To Swallow This,' Rant Told Me. 'you Can Always Just Die.

Funerals Are All Abstract Ceremony.

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

Where I'm Is One Of Those Stair Climbing Machines The Agent Has Installed. You Climb And Climb Forever And Never Get Off The Ground. You're Trapped In Your Hotel Room. It's The Mystical Sweat Love Lodge Experience Of Our Time, The Only Sort Of Indian Vision Quest We Can Schedule Into Our Daily Planner.our Stair Master To Heaven.

Control The Things You Can Control. As For The Rest - God Bless It All.

Things You Can Control

It's The Marilyn Monroe School Of Medicine Where Enough Of Any Drug Will Cure Any Disease.

Maybe We Have To Break Everything To Make Something Better Out Of Ourselves.

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Something Better

Sometimes The Very Best Way To Deal With Unpleasant Things Is To Depict Them In Ways That Allow People To Laugh At Them And Destroy The Power Of Unsayable Things, Rather Than Refusing To Acknowledge Them.

A Guy's Calling To Say He's Failing Algebra Ii. Just As A Point Of Practice, I Say, Kill Yourself. A Woman Calls And Says Her Kids Won't Behave. Without Missing A Beat, I Tell Her, Kill Yourself. A Man Calls To Say His Car Won't Start. Kill Yourself. A Woman Calls To Ask What Time The Late Movie Starts. Kill Yourself. She Asks, "isn't This 555-1327? Is This The Moorehouse Cineplex? I Say, Kill Yourself. Kill Yourself. Kill Yourself.

We Thought All This Teaching Was To Make Us Smart. What It Did Was Make Us Stupid. With All The Little Facts We Learned, We Never Had The Time To Think.

Ideas Come At Any Moment -- Except When You Demand Them. Most Ideas Come While I'm Physically Active, At The Gym, With Friends, Gardening, So I Always Carry Pen And Paper. My First Draft Is Always Written In Longhand. But Once The First Dozen Chapters, More Like Short Stories, Are Written, Then Momentum Builds Until I Can't Leave The Project Until It's Done.

At Some Point, Your Memories, Your Stories, Your Adventures, Will Be The Only Things You'll Have Left.

No Matter What Happens, It’s Always Now.

My Theory Is That Church Used To Be That Place. Instead Of Being A Place Where You Went To Look Good, It Was A Place Where You Could Risk Going Every Week To Look Your Worst.

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.

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

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.

In A City This Size, Every Year, Hundreds Of Husbands Walk Away. Kids Leave Home. Wives Escape. People Disappear.

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.

We All Have Some Proper Noun To Blame.

We Don't Need Women. There Are Plenty Other Things In The World To Have Sex With, Just Go To A Sexaholics Meeting And Take Notes. There's Microwaved Watermelons. There's The Vibrating Handles Of Lawn Mowers Right At Crotch Level. There's Vacuum Cleaners And Beanbag Chairs. Internet Sites. All Those Old Chat Room Sex Hounds Pretending To Be Sixteen-year-old Girls. For Serious, Old Fbi Guys Makes The Sexiest Cyberbabes.

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

You Couldn't Have Small, Dying Children In A Movie Without Really Bringing Everyone Down, But You Can In Comics.

I Am The Child Of A Lunatic. Not A Child Of God.

And It's Funny How When Somebody Saves You, The First Thing You Want To Do Is Save Other People. All Other People. Everybody. The Kid Never Knew The Man's Name. But He Never Forgot That Smile. "hero" Isn't The First Word, But It's The First Word That Comes To Mind.

Any Time Some Well-meaning Person Forces You To Demonstrate You Have No Talent And Rubs Your Nose In The Fact You're A Failure At The Only Dream You Ever Had, Take Another Drink.

Besides, Hysteria Is Only Possible With An Audience.

Maybe It's Just A Daughter's Job To Piss Off Her Mother.

What You Write Should Entertain You And Serve You First. Don't Worry About Maintaining Anything Beyond Your Own Attention. Focus On Exorcising Your Demons In The Work. If You Can Do That, Then You'll Succeed In The World.

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

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.

His Saliva Tasted Like The Wet Dicks Of Ten Thousand Lonely Truck Drivers.

I Don't Do Much More Than Organise Other People's Ideas And Insights And Thoughts, And Sort Of Harvest Them, And Inventory Them And Present Them.

Writers Should Be Able To Fully Deduct From Their Taxes All Writing-related Expenses, Including Alcohol, Parking Tickets, Court Judgments, Fines For Lewd Public Behavior, Zoloft, And Cigarettes.

Marla's Philosophy Of Life, She Told Me, Is That She Can Die At Any Moment. The Tragedy Of Her Life Is That She Doesn't.

For Sure, They Don't Teach You This In History Class, But In Colonial Times, The Person Who Got Left In The Stocks Overnight Was Nothing Less Than Fair Game For Everybody To Nail. Men Or Women, Anybody Bent Over Had No Way Of Knowing Who Was Doing The Ram Job, And This Was The Real Reason You Never Wanted To End Up Here Unless You Had A Family Member Or A Friend Who'd Stand With You The Whole Time. To Protect You. To Watch Your Ass, For Real.

Our Purest Form Of Joy Comes When People We Envy Get Hurt. That Most Genuine Form Of Joy.

Everything Is Funnier In Retrospect, Funnier And Prettier And Cooler. You Can Laugh At Anything From Far Enough Away.

Here In Your Mind You Have Complete Privacy. Here There's No Difference Between What Is And What Could Be.

Without Pain, Without Sacrifice We Would Have Nothing. Like The First Monkey Shot Into Space.

And If You Believe That We Really Have Free Will, Then You Know That God Can't Really Control Us. And Since God Can't Control Us, All God Does Is Watch And Change Channels When He Gets Bored.

Yes, These Are Bruises From Fighting And I'm Okay With That.

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

Only Through Destroying Myself Can I Discover The Greater Power Of My Spirit.

Fight Club Book

When Someone Walks In And You Say "a Six-foot-tall Man," You Miss The Opportunity To Describe What A Six-foot-tall Man Would Look Like To Your Narrator, Because How The Narrator Describes A Six-foot-tall Man Says More About The Narrator Than About The Man.

When We Don't Know Who To Hate, We Hate Ourselves.

If There Had Been Zombies On The Iceberg When The Titanic Hit It, That Would Have Made A Much Better Movie.

Years Of Living In The Hope That What You'll Get Will Be Better Than What You Have. Years Of Looking And Feeling Worse In The Hope That You Might Look Better.

The Girls You Meet Are Never Very Far From Their Worst-case Scenario.

Worst Case Scenario

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.

The Cancer I Don't Have Is Everywhere Now.

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

Every Time We Burn A Gallon Of Gas Or An Acre Of Rain Forest, Aren't We Killing The Future To Preserve The Present?

The One You Love And The One Who Loves You Are Never, Ever The Same Person.

If You're Not Drunk And Half Naked By This Point, You're Not Paying Attention.

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.

We're All Going Overnight Express Delivery Straight To Hell.

We’d Turn Our Lives Into A Terrible Adventure. A True-life Horror Story With A Happy Ending. A Trial We’d Survive To Talk About.

The Whole World Is A Disaster Waiting To Happen.

You Gain Power By Pretending To Be Weak. By Contrast, You Make People Feel Strong. You Save People By Letting Them Save You.

There Was No Real Sense Of Life Because She Had Nothing To Contrast It With.

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Fight Club Novel

I Am Jack's Complete Lack Of Surprise. I Am Jack's Broken Heart.

With Insomnia, You're Never Really Awake; But You're Never Really Asleep.

Yes, Terrible Things Happen, But Sometimes Those Terrible Things - They Save You.

A Moment Is All You Can Expect From Perfection.

The Liberator Who Destroys My Property Is Fighting To Save My Spirit. The Teacher Who Clears All Possessions From My Path Will Set Me Free.

Every Time I Write Something, I Think, This Is The Most Offensive Thing I Will Ever Write. But No. I Always Surprise Myself.

Imagine A Plague You Catch Through Your Ears.

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

This Would Be...a Book That Would Be A Trapdoor Down Into Some Place Dark. A Place Only You Could Go, Alone, When You Opened The Cover. Because Only Books Have That Power.

Mylife Might Be Little And Boring, But At Least It’s Mine - Not Some Assembly-line, Secondhand, Hand-me-down Life.

I Can Become Someone Else, Not Out Of Pressure And Desperation, But Merely Because A New Life Sounds Fun Or Interesting Or Joyful.

Because Nothing Is As Perfect As You Can Imagine It.

You’ve Thrown Down The Gauntlet. You’ve Brought My Wrath Down Upon Your House. Now, To Prove That I Exist I Must Kill You. As The Child Outlives The Father, So Must The Character Bury The Author. If You Are, In Fact, My Continuing Author, Then Killing You Will End My Existence As Well. Small Loss. Such A Life, As Your Puppet, Is Not Worth Living. But… If I Destroy You And Your Dreck Script, And I Still Exist… Then My Existence Will Be Glorious, For I Will Become My Own Master.

He Was Assaulting The World By Assaulting Himself.

It's Only After We've Lost Everything That We're Free To Do Anything.

When I First Started Writing, There Was No Way I'd Write A Sex Scene. That Just Seemed Impossible. That's Why In "fight Club" All The Sex Happens Off-screen. It's All Just A Noise On The Other Side Of The Wall Or The Ceiling. I Just Couldn't Bring To Write In A Scene Like That. So One Of The Challenges With "choke" Was I Wanted To Write Sex Scenes Until I Was Really Comfortable Just Writing Them In A Very Mechanical Way.

Shotgunning Anybody In This Room Would Be The Moral Equivalent Of Killing A Car, A Barbie Doll, A Vacuum Cleaner. We're All Such Products.

Love And Life Belongs To Great Risk.

The Most Boring Scenes Are The Scenes Where A Character Is Alone.

More Than One Side? You're Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Jackass!

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.

In The Big Factory Of Perfecting Human Souls, The Earth Was Kind Of Tumbler. The Sale As The Kind People Use To Polish Rocks. All Souls Come Here To Rub The Sharp Edges Off Each Other. This Isn't Suffering. It's Erosion.

The Best Fights Don't Occur Between Strangers. They Occur Between Friends Who Trust Each Other.

The Truth Is, Every Son Raised By A Single Mom Is Pretty Much Born Married. I Don't Know, But Until Your Mom Dies It Seems Like All The Other Women In Your Life Can Never Be More Than Just Your Mistress.

As If You Cut Open A Rag Doll With A Sill Name, And Found Inside:real Intestines, Real Lungs, A Beating Heart And Blood. A Lot Of Hot, Sticky Blood.

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

Anything You Can Aquire Is Only Another Thing You'll Lose.

If It Comes Down To A Choice Between Being Unloved And Being Vulnerable And Sensitive And Emotional, Then You Can Just Keep Your Love.

We Are A Nation Of Physical Animals Who Have Forgotten How Much We Enjoy Being That. We Are Cushioned By This Kind Of Make-believe, Unreal World And Have No Idea What We Can Survive Because We Are Never Challenged Or Tested.

The Weather Today Is Partly Angry, Leading To Resignation And Ultimatums.

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

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 You Only Look When You Love The Person Taking The Picture.

Minimalism Seems Closest To The Sophisticated Storytelling Of Movies. Movies Have Really Educated Contemporary Audiences To Be The Most Intelligent, Sophisticated Audiences In History. We Don't Any Longer Need To Have The Relationship Between One Scene And The Next Explained. We Will Figure It Out Ourselves.

To Preserve Yourself As The Center Of The World, To Stay Your Own Best Authority On Everything, Your Own Expert On All Topics, Infallible, Omniscient. Always, Every Time Of The Month, Forever: Use Birth Control.

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

If There’s Any Trick To Doing A Job You Hate . . . Mrs. Clark Says It’s To Find A Job You Hate Even More.

I Don't Know The Difference Between What I Want And What I'm Trained To Want.

When You Don't Share Your Problems, You Resent Hearing The Problems Of Other People.

It's Okay To Cry As Long As You're Faking It.

Imagine Books And Music And Movies Being Filtered And Homogenized. Certified. Approved For Consumption. People Will Be Happy To Give Up Most Of Their Culture For The Assurance That The Tiny Bit That Comes Through Is Safe And Clean. White Noise.

I Want Out Of The Labels. I Don't Want My Whole Life Crammed Into A Single Word. A Story. I Want To Find Something Else, Unknowable, Some Place To Be That's Not On The Map. A Real Adventure.' A Spinx. A Mystery. A Blank. Unknown. Undefined.

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.

They're Just Words Is All. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.

I Haven't Shoplifted Since I Was 13.

Stone Crumbles. Wood Rots. People, Well They Die. But Things As Fragile As A Thought, A Dream, A Legend, They Can Go On And On.

I'm Not Sure What We're Running From. Nobody. Or The Future. Fate. Growing Up. Getting Old. Picking Up The Pieces. As If Running We Won't Have To Get On With Our Lives.

Screenwriters Get Paid A Hell Of A Lot More Money But Their Level Of Frustration Seems To Be So High That I Don't Want That.

Folks Build A Reputation By Attacking You While You’re Alive - Or Praising You After You Ain’t.

What I'm Always Trying To Do With Every Book Is To Recreate The Effect Of The Stories We Heard As Children In Front Of Campfires And Fireplaces - The Ghost Stories That Engaged Us.

I Am Not Loved. I Am Not A Beautiful Soul. I Am Not A Good-natured, Giving Person. I Am Not Anybody's Savior.

The Best Way Is Not To Fight It, Just Go. Don't Be Trying All The Time To Fix Things. What You Run From Only Stays With You Longer. When You Fight Something, You Only Make It Stronger.

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.

Maybe This Is Why Misty Loved Him. Loved You. Because You Believed In Her So Much More Than She Did. You Expected More From Her Than She Did From Herself.

My Writing Has To Excite People And Depict Or Include Their Experiences. That's Part Of My Process - To Go Out And Interact With People. It's Very Much Like An Archival Process. I Understand That The Brothers Grimm Would Go Out And Get People Talking So They Could Document Folk Tales That Weren't Being Documented Any Other Way. I Try To Offer A Little Bit Of Myself - Some Experience From My Life That Evokes Stories In Other People.

You Can Only Hold A Smile For So Long, After That It's Just Teeth.

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.

To Repeat, The Way You Get To The Huge, Impossible Yes Is, You Start Collecting A Lot Of Easy, Small Yeses.

Or Maybe...just Maybe This Whole Process Is Our Training Wheels Towards Something Bigger. If We Can Reflect And Know Our Lives, We Might Stay Awake And Shape Our Futures.

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.

History Is Nothing Except Monsters Or Victims. Or Witnesses.

From Famous Artists To Building Contractors, We All Want To Leave Our Signature. Our Lasting Effect. Your Life After Death. We All Want To Explain Ourselves. Nobody Wants To Be Forgotten.

To A Certain Extent Everybody Has A Certain Sort Of Way Of Being A Persona That They Learn How To Be When They're Really Little. They Figure Out That If They're Really Funny, Or Really Pretty, Or If They Work Really, Really Hard Or Are Really Smart, Then That's What's Going To Get Them By. That Is What Is Going To Make People Like Them.

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

Kids, She Says. When They’re Little, They Believe Everything You Tell Them About The World. As A Mother, You’re The World Almanac And The Encyclopedia And The Dictionary And The Bible, All Rolled Up Together. But After They Hit Some Magic Age, It’s Just The Opposite. After That, You’re Either A Liar Or A Fool Or A Villain.

There's An Old Saying: 'no Piece Of Writing Is Ever Finished, It's Just Abandoned.' But My Own Rule Is: No Piece Of Work Is Done Until You Want To Kill Everyone Involved In The Publishing Process, Especially Yourself.

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

Real Writers Write Because They Love To Write. They Don't Write For Public Acclaim.

How This Feels Is I'm Just Another Task In God's Daily Planner: The Renaissance Pencilled In For Right After The Dark Ages. The Information Age Is Scheduled Immediately After The Industrial Revolution. Then The Post-modern Era, Then The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And Between The Big Events, The Earthquakes And Tidal Waves, God's Got Me Squeezed In For A Cameo Appearance. Then Maybe In Thirty Years, Or Maybe Next Year, God's Daily Planner Has Me Finished.

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