We know have the power of God in many ways: the atomic bomb, the ability to create life in a test tube, cloning, artificial intelligence.

Being an unpublished novelist has about as much social acceptability as being a shopping bag lady.

The promise of eternal life makes people forsake the life they're given.

I turn and I slowly walk away and I don't look back. It has always been a fault of mine, but it is the way I am. I never look back. Never.

Every year, at 8:00 PM on the second Saturday of July, hundreds of people gather along a section of Los Angeles rail track to drop their pants and moon passing passenger trains.

I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag full of mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.