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.

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.