Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.
I have an experience with as many of my readers as possible that's really genuine. I love it when they write to me, and I'm able to send them things. I love meeting them in person, and even if it's only for a moment I love having that physical, touching interaction.
The one thing I cannot stand is when I do interviews, when I interview people, and I listen to the tapes and I hear myself talking and sort of stumble and stammer, or I hear the horrible sound of my own voice, or God forbid I see myself on video, there is that complete revulsion with seeing how I occur in the world.
Everyone wants to be tested and challenged. Everyone would like a good, honest fight to exhaust their frustrations.
Schools of science and physics replacing each other at a faster and faster rate. Just the nature of our world is constant revision, constant...negation of previous beliefs, and so...the whole world is a twist ending. Every week is a twist ending.
I'm really glad that I made a lot of mistakes, poorly chose my friends throughout my twenties, and didn't have a rocket trajectory that set me on one path without making any mistakes or having any setbacks. The older I get, the more I realize that it's all of these failed, horrible things from my past, and the stories that they generated, that are the things I will draw on for the rest of my 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.
You could go church and you could describe your worst behavior, your worst self, and despite your worst behavior you would be forgiven and then redeemed and then accepted back into the community through communion. So you didn't have to carry this burden your entire life. Once a week you went someplace you went someplace where you could really look terrible and be loved despite how terrible you were.
Screenwriters get paid a hell of a lot more money but their level of frustration seems to be so high that I don't want that.
I went to sexaholics anonymous for six months. For research. I wanted to see the structure of the groups, how they were conducted, and what the atmosphere was like, and also to be able to describe the people as human beings, rather than as the dirty jokes that they are in our culture.
I know so many writers who are a hundred times better than me and have longer, greater ideas than mine, but they gave up; they stopped. The biggest talent you can have is determination.
People who don't want to get on with their lives, and don't want to accept responsibility for the direction of their lives want to hang out with other people who don't want to accept responsibility or move on, and so you find that your entire culture around you are people who are just like you, because that's what's comforting.
More and more we are taught something throughout our growing up, our education, and continuously, no matter how much we believe in this thing, something comes up that forces us to revise our entire belief system. No matter whom you idolize, it turns out that Louis Armstrong collected vast amounts of pornography.
And it [Fight Club novel] was written so general that my father thought I was writing about his father, and my boss thought I was writing about his boss. People really put themselves, you know, in the shoes of the narrator.
When I see people talking on the internet about me or my work it's almost always more a description of themselves and so I never really think of myself as anything more than just who I always was.
I see so many tattoos of my stuff on people - tattoos of my book covers, tattoos of quotes . . . it's kind of daunting sometimes.
I spend most of my life just listening to people.
I learned all those jokes in second grade. Second grade is really where they tell you those horrific jokes, racist jokes and misogynistic jokes that you have no idea what they mean, and you just memorize them because they have a very strong effect, they make people laugh in this kind of nervous, horrible way, and it's only later that you realize that you've got a head full of crap.
My writing process isn't a very organized thing. The actual writing part is a tiny part of my life. I often write in public. I bring my laptop or write freehand in notebooks. Then, I'll read through them while I exercise or walk the dog. The very last thing I do is the sitting alone at the computer part.
I realized that my book readings were boring me. I was going to go up there and read a passage and sleepwalk through the whole event and I needed to make it more interesting. I wanted to be running and jumping and do something so that the event would be so exciting. I had to trick myself into having fun every time.
Abortion occurs so frequently in my stories. Abortion sort of synthesizes both sex and death. To have sex and death placed as close to one another as possible is always a goal of mine.
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.
Ultimately, everyone is acting out of what they feel is the best choice. In a way, they're all trying to improve the world. And I think that those basic choices make the world a better place.
I remember selling my first short story and thinking, Oh my god, I sold something for fifty dollars! That gives me the authority to say I'm a writer and to actually write more things! It legitimized the activity.
There is a social contract in "Fight Club" and in "Choke" where the protagonist has deceived a whole bunch of people. In "Choke" it's all of these people who think that they've saved his life, and really care about him because they've embraced him and they've been his saviors. In "Fight Club" it's all of these people who are dying of various diseases, and they thought that Edward Norton was also dying so they allowed him really strong pent-up emotions.
