"I write to find out what I think."
— Stephen King

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Memoir is about handing over you life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it."
— Jeannette Walls

"How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?"
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."
— Edgar Degas

"If we can forgive what’s been done to us . . .
If we can forgive what we’ve done to others . . . If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Maybe I’m drunk right now, even though I don’t remember drinking anything.
When I’m drunk, I say things without thinking. Drinking numbs you from your ability to
reason. It makes you forget your own character and become a crazy. Maybe I am a
crazy now; I’m going through so much chaos these days that reality is hard to grasp."
— Carlton Mellick III (Satan Burger)

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
— Edith Wharton

"Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored."
— George Saunders

"“How can you possibly believe he really loves you?” Miss Sneezy looks from the Mother to the Saint to Mr. Whittier’s hand.“You have no choice,” Mr. Whittier tells her. “If you need to be loved.”"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
— Oscar Wilde

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

"“You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,” he says, “the same way this theater seems to digest people.” With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold,
branched with arms and legs.
Other events—the ones you can’t digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can’t talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you’re Cassandra’s wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.
But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good. Those are stories as important as food. Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead.
Consumed. Digested. Absorbed."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them
thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything. "
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"It is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in
technique, that men cooks arc preferred to women."
— George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London)

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring
shape-outlines we have to blink against."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"DEBROUILLARD is what every PLONGEUR
wants to be called. A DEBROUILLARD is a man who, even when he is told to do
the impossible, will SE DEBROUILLER--get it done somehow."
— George Orwell

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of
warm earth. Suicide weather."
— Susanna Kaysen

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

"When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"I felt like I was walking on an airport's rubber conveyor belt."
— Douglas Coupland

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
— Malcolm X

"Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide. "
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model."
— Banksy (Wall and Piece)

"Some stories, she’d say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"...the change was adjustment without improvement."
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"Once upon a time, there was a king who ruled a great and glorious nation. Favourite amongst his subjects was the court painter of whom he was very proud. Everybody agreed this wizzened old man pianted the greatest pictures in the whole kingdom and the king would spend hours each day gazing at them in wonder. However, one day a dirty and dishevelled stranger presented himself at the court claiming that in fact he was the greatest painter in the land. The indignant king decreed a competition would be held between the two artists, confident it would teach the vagabond an embarrassing lesson. Within a month they were both to produce a masterpiece that would out do the other. After thirty days of working feverishly day and night, both artists were ready. They placed their paintings, each hidden by a cloth, on easels in the great hall of the castle. As a large crowd gathered, the king ordered the cloth be pulled first from the court artist’s easel. Everyone gasped as before them was revealed a wonderful oil painting of a table set with a feast. At its centre was an ornate bowl full of exotic fruits glistening moistly in the dawn light. As the crowd gazed admiringly, a sparrow perched high up on the rafters of the hall swooped down and hungrily tried to snatch one of the grapes from the painted bowl only to hit the canvas and fall down dead with shock at the feet of the king. ’Aha!’ exclaimed the king. ’My artist has produced a painting so wonderful it has fooled nature herself, surely you must agree that he is the greatest painter who ever lived!’ But the vagabond said nothing and stared solemnly at his feet. ’Now, pull the blanket from your painting and let us see what you have for us,’ cried the king. But the tramp remained motionless and said nothing. Growing impatient, the king stepped forward and reached out to grab the blanket only to freeze in horror at the last moment. ’You see,’ said the tramp quietly, ’there is no blanket covering the painting. This is actually just a painting of a cloth covering a painting. And whereas your famous artist is content to fool nature, I’ve made the king of the whole country look like a clueless little twat."
— Banksy (Wall and Piece)

"They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful. Because now she looks so—bad. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass."
— Charles Bukowski (The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken over the Ship)

"The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together"
— Billy Collins

"The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread
of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp
earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes,
defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began
to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that
the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth
in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was
getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of
what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small
bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl
friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the
sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth
made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the
ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were
transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh
aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.
"
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"The heart was made to be broken."
— Oscar Wilde

"Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing . . ."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"Let's put a
chimpanzee in a tiny cage fronted by concrete bars. The animal would go berserk,
throw itself against the walls, rip out its hair, inflict cruel bites on itself, and in 73%
of cases will actually end up killing itself. Let's now make a breach in one of the
walls, which we will place next to a bottomless precipice. Our friendly sample
quadrumane will approach the edge, he'll look down, but remain at the edge for
ages, return there time and again, but generally he won't teeter over the brink; and
in all events his nervous state will be radically assuaged."
— Michel Houellebecq (Whatever)

"Daytime television, you can tell who’s watching by the three kinds of commercials. Either it’s clinics for drying out drunks. Or it’s law firms who want to settle injury suits. Or it’s schools offering mail-order vocational degrees to make you a bookkeeper. A private detective. Or a locksmith. If you’re watching daytime television, this is your new demographic. You’re a drunk. Or a cripple. Or an idiot. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."
— Albert Camus

"A journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)