You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.
It’s funny how you never think about the women you’ve had. It’s always the ones who get away that you can’t forget.
Masochism is a valuable job skill.
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.
When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away from other people, and my writing sucked. Now I have a laptop; I can do the most tedious part of my job in a public place.
People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.
Few things in life seem more sexy than a banned book.
I think that I am responsible for the death of thousands of things and for the misery of thousands of people, just through the things that I buy and how I live my life, and these are not things that ever deserved to die.
Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
So much of ‘Fight Club’ was a rant against fathers.
More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself.
I usually write in my kitchen, which is a large, octagonal room that looks into woods – three big windows look out into the trees.
David Fincher is a genius.
For me, writing is a kind of coping mechanism.
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.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.
A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
I used to work as a volunteer in a hospice, but I don’t have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything, so I was what they call an escort. I would take people to the support groups every night, and I would have to sit sort of on the sidelines so I could take them back to hospice at the end of the meeting.
The bright future is that readers are accepting more varied forms of stories.
The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.
Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it’s the things you don’t do, and you get screwed.
If you take my stuff apart, you’ll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who’s probably my favourite writer.
I don’t think ‘Guts’ could get financed as a movie.
People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens.
I try to forget about the expectation that’s out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I’m not trying to please them. I’ve spent a huge amount of time not communicating with those folks and denying that they exist.
My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way.
I am enormously uncool. I’ve made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I’m fine with that.
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I’m shocked by the deeply personal things I’ve put into books without realizing it.
If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever.
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?
I’m only confrontational with my friends.
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.
My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: ‘Writers write because they weren’t invited to a party.’ That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.
My parents used to fight a lot, and I think they fought a lot at night, and they would turn the television up to hide the sound of their fighting.
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.
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.
If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.
My publisher’s been shipping me to comic-cons, and it seems that my readership overlaps perfectly with the comic-con crowd.
Maybe it’s our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.
Writing gave me the world.
My father used to call me ‘bird bones’ and, well, the name fits.
I’m trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.
Every author has to eventually write a food book.
I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.
A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.
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.
My writing process isn’t a very organized thing.
If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that’s much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
My goal is never to make fun of religion.
Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There’s a fantastic joy in destroying something that you’ve meticulously built. Then you’re free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation… they’re inseparable.
I wouldn’t get nearly as many books written if I lived in New York. The Columbia Gorge is fantastic. When the sun shines, I just want to be outdoors.
I’ve always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.
I live by fallacy. ‘If I get enough nice Ikea furniture, I’ll be a grown-up.’ Then I catch myself. Or, ‘If I get off by myself, away from the stress of modern life, I’ll be OK.’ Then I catch myself.
I think Chris Brown gets kind of dismissed as a gay writer, and I think Chris’s books are really, really smart. I wish his books sold a little more widely.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There’s such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it – Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Alexander McQueen, Heath Ledger.
My books are all fantastically sentimental.
I’ve got two dogs; they’re Boston terriers, and they’re allowed everywhere.
Why do the lives of writers seem so… train-wrecky?
At school I was lazy. But I started working when I was 15, washing dishes at a local truck stop restaurant. I was really, really bored with school, and I wanted to get a job as fast as I could. School was just so easy. There was just no challenge to it.
Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that’s usually how you end up crying?
The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. 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 used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.
It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can’t shut them up.
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.
