With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.

Even if I overcompensate, nobody will ever want me. Not Seth. Not my folks. You can’t kiss someone who has no lips. Oh, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I’ll be anybody you want me to be

Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation they're inseparable.

What would Tyler Durden do?

If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.

Everyone holds a certain type of power. For young people, it's their youth, their attractiveness, and their energy. But they're terrified that as those qualities fade, what are they going to replace that form of power with?