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.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

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

It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can't shut them up.

I'm only confrontational with my friends.

Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.

I haven't shoplifted since I was 13.

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.

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.

I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.

There will always be an underground.

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.

If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can.

I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.

Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.

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.

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

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.

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.

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

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.

I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it's good to add more emotion and chaos.

Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn't know anything.

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.

The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring.

The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

We kind of deny the stages of life.

I don't know if you ever really feel like you've made it.

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.

You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

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

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.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

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.

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.

I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.

I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?

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

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

As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more?

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.

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.

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 will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.

Every author has to eventually write a food book.

My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.