Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.

It's interesting because when David Fincher was making "Fight Club," he said, "It's a romance." And it really is. Almost everything I ever write is just a romance. And that needed to be sort of pointed up at the end of "Fight Club." The film has a very different ending than the book does.

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

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.

I didn't use anybody's story. I used the context and the structure of the situation. People were so, so desperate to tell their story and begin to digest their experience - like turning it into a story - that after the fist few weeks I could go with a pad and pencil and take notes. People didn't seem at all bothered by that.

Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.

Someone bent on suicide won't have much sense of humor left.