“Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn't know anything.”
“People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.”
“Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?”
“The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.”
“Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.”
“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?”
“Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.”
“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
“Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?”
“It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.”
“When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?”
“My goal is more to be remembered. They'll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.”
“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
“Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.”
“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.”
“Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.”
“I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.”
“Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.”
“I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.”
“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
“Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?”
“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.”
“If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.”
“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.”
“I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.”
“I have a lot of money.”
“The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.”
“Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”
“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.”
“You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.”
“I try to forget about the expectation that's out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I'm not trying to please them. I've spent a huge amount of time not communicating with those folks and denying that they exist.”
“If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?”
“Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.”
“Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.”