Intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don't want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they're emotional or spiritual. I'm trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them.

My books are more about people experimenting with different identities and social models in a short-term way before they can break through to something authentic.

Public taste changes and the aesthetic of a culture changes over time, so the idea isn't to appeal to the aesthetic of the moment and what people will like right now; the idea is to somehow keep yourself in the public memory so that as taste evolves it will eventually come to embrace your thing. So, it's about writing to be remembered rather than writing to be liked.

The girl's lover was gone, but his shadow was still there.

And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

I think that young people are less attached to items and objects now. They're less attached to consuming things and accruing things because they see it as a system that doesn't necessarily work and give them a sense of adulthood and fulfillment. They're much more in tune with wanting to achieve a skill, a form of self-expression, or a body of knowledge that fulfills the same function, fulfills their adulthood.