"Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life."

"The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled."

"We ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs. Distort it. We will toss the story into the air at parties and howl over its ripeness. Degraded as it was, we will degrade it further. Make it more swollen. We shall render it impossibly awful, making of it the mythology of ourselves. A comfort. Proof of the trials we've survived."

"She says, "Do you have any rubbers?" I say, I thought she was barren. "Sure, I'm sterile," she says, "but I've had unprotected sex with a million guys. I could have some terrible fatal disease." I say that would only be a problem if I wanted to live a lot longer. Fertility says, " That's how I feel about my giant credit card debt." So we have sex. If you could call it that."

"We just had a near-life experience!"

"First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life."

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."

"Give me lust, baby.Flash.Give me malice.Flash.Give me detached existentialist ennui.Flash.Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.Flash."

"Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship."

"Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love."

"Good news didn't seem real until you'd told at least a dozen friends."

"Listening, it occurred to Randall that the love people feel for animals is the purest form of love. Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you. Like that movie with Ali McGraw. There was no future, just the affection of the present moment. You didn't expect a big payoff, someday."

"On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

"They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment."

"Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950's. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead."

"When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

"You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble."

"Art never comes from happiness."

"To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard."

"I asked if Tyler was an artist. Tyler shrugged...What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. . . he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler sat in the palm of a perfection he'd created himself. One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."

"No, it's not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You'll find out for yourself soon enough. It won't help the situation for you to get all upset."

"I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn't see any way to change things.Only end them."

"No, I say, it's fine.Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. Just great, I say. Really."

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

"Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person."

"I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo.""Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?"

"I don't want to die without any scars."

"That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community."

"You'd be surprised just how fast you can close the door on your past. Learn needlepoint. Make a stained-glass lamp."

"My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers."

"I know that I'm going to die and that you're going to die. I can't do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure."

"It's not love or anything, but I think I like you, too."

"Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution."

"I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's just about getting off. Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love."

"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."

"You have to give up! you have to give up!You have to realize that someday you will die,Until you know that, you are useless!"

"In a way, being an addict is very proactive. A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway."

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."

"There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over."

"A woman eats to feed her pussy." Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification."

"It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one."

"Le stelle in cieloNon conoscono l'iraBla, bla, bla, fine."

"Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy."

"For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose ... watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh."

"You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways."

"Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue."

"It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die."

"We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think."

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

"To Mr. Jones, she said, imagine you're looking up at a blue sky, and imagine a tiny airplane skywriting the letter Z. Then let the wind erase the letter. Then imagine the plane writing the letter Y. Let the wind erase it. Then the letter X. Erase it. Then the letter W. Let the wind erase it."