Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

I might be a touch of a sadist and a little bit jejune... but at least I'm not a victim, not any longer. I hope. I hope, therefore I am.

After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life

Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.

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.

My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.

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.

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.

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.

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.

Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.

The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

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 just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.

Every stage of life has its own form of power, and we're always sort of terrified as to whether we can make the jump to the next form of power.

Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass." Like somehow we're running out of time.

Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.

The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.

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.

There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns.

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.

The career of a movie star consists of helping everyone else forget their troubles. Using charm and beauty and good cheer to make life look easy.

We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.

Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb.

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.

Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you're a real person, and some will just ignore you." The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.

You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.

I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything... I wish, just once, I could say, 'This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.

There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

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.

I always really curious to see how people interpret things. I know my version, and I'm kind of bored with my version so I want to see their version.

Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?

Arguing that God doesn't exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn't exist because they couldn't see them.

"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives."

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.

In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.

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.

How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.

some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

The bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life. Our real discoveries come from chaos. - Brandy Alexander

A knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.

When I visit my brother in South Africa, I order things I've only seen in zoos. Little deers and kudu, all the mammals you would never think of eating.

The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate.

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