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.

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

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

Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

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.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

Masochism is a valuable job skill.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

The answer is there is no answer.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.

If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

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.

Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?

The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

I just don't want to die without a few scars.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.

Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

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 have a lot of money.

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.