We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.

The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.

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

I'm always looking for context in which people tell stories. In "Fight Club" it's these support groups for dying people, and then in "Choke" it's 12-step recovery groups. In one novel it's artists' colonies, in another novel it's a diary form that submariners' wives typically keep so that when their husband comes back from serving on a submarine they have an accounting of their spouse's time. So I'm always looking for, number one, a non-fiction context - because you can tell a more outrageous story if you use a non-fiction form.

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

I'm always identifying some fallacy in my own life. I'm sort of making fun of myself by exploring and unpacking just why I'm sort of automatically thrown to be a certain way.