"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its 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. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."

"She said when a boy and a girl dog copulate, the head of the boy's penis swells and the vaginal muscles of the girl constrict. Even after sex, both dogs remain locked together, helpless and miserable for a brief period of time.The Mommy said this same scenario described most marriages."

"The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday."

"Every garden looks beautiful in May.' Meaning: Everyone is somewhat attractive when she's young."

"If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes."

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

"You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real."

"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."

"It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power, the same way money is power, the same way a gun is power."

"After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting."

"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."

"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."

"Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master, and nobody had noticed. Still, i'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When i pass people in the hall at work, I get toally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE."

"Some people still think knowledge is power."

"Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit."

"My mom would spy by satellite, turning down the air conditioning, colder and colder, with a tapping keystroke via her wireless connection, chilling that house, that one room, meat locker cold, ski-slope cold, spending a king's ransom on Freon and electric power, trying to make some doomed ten bucks' worth of pretty pink flowers last one more day."

"The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine."

"He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself."

"I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God."

"There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.There is no free will. There are no variables."

"Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead."

"Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal."

"Make me into anything, but just love me."

"Everyone wants to feel special - attain a special status among their pears- but not too special. Most kids want to be special the same way their friends are."

"With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels."

"Death is a long process," Archer says. "Your body is just the first part of you that croaks." Meaning: Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. And your anger about investing a lifetime in learning shit and loving people and earning money, only to have all that crap come to basically nothing. Really, your physical body dying is the easy part. Beyond that, your memories must die. And your ego. Your pride and shame and ambition and hope, all that Personal Identity Crap can take centuries to expire."

"The first rule of Fight Club is: you don't talk about Fight Club. - The second rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club- Third rule of Fight Club, if someone yells "stop!, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over- Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight- Fifth rule: one fight at a time- Sixth rule: the fights are bare knuckle. No shirt, no shoes, no weapons- Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to- The eighth : if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight."

"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."

"How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who seek to bring them to justice. It's no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited detectives with his - or her - coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired."

"I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching."

"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."

"It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself."

"Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you."

"After fight club you're so relaxed, you just cannot care."

"What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven."

"Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."

"Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here."

"Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done."

"Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home, it's your responsibility to love it, or change it."

"Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second."

"Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn't bother to torture you if she didn't."

"She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams."

"But if you tell folks you're a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you're talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn't work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons."

"For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do."

"The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage."

"Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains."

"People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love."

"Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.At least the ancient Greeks were being honest."

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

"I'm an invisible monster. I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse."