I tried to make meat loaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her bodyCollection: Girl
'Do you know what Ed Gein said about women?' [...] '"When I see a pretty girl walking down the street I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and treat her right."' I stop finish my J&B in one swallow. 'What does the other part of him think?' Hamlin asks tentatively. 'What her head would look like on a stick...'Collection: Girl
I could stay living in this city if they just installed Blaupunkts in the cabs.Collection: Cities
There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.Collection: Drinking
Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead.Collection: Sex
People are afraid to merge.Collection: People
I am gripped by an existential panic.Collection: Panic
When the going gets tough, the tough go drinking.Collection: Drinking
He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all.Collection: Secret
I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.Collection: Reality
I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.Collection: Smart
I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.Collection: Scene
There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.Collection: Book
You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.Collection: Writing
And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea.Collection: Numbness
I've forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where.Collection: Lunch
Baby, when you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to say live and let live. You know you did, you know you did, you know you did.Collection: Baby
I wasn't acting on passion. I was simply acting.Collection: Passion
How could she ever understand that there isn't any way could be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to?Collection: Way
I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.Collection: Moving
By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world.Collection: Reading
The snowy owl has eyes that look just like mine, especially when it widens them. And while I stand there, staring at it, lowering my sunglasses, something unspoken passes between me and the bird - there's this weird kind of tension, a bizarre pressure, that fuels the following, which starts, happens, ends, very quickly.Collection: Eye
I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.Collection: Thinking
It's because you're always fighting sentiment. You're fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way.Collection: Mother
People just... disappear," he says. "The Earth just opens up and swallows people," I say, some what sadly, checking my Rolex. "Eerie." Kimball yawns, stretching. "Really eerie." "Ominous." I nod my agreement. "It's just"- he sights, exasperated- "futile.Collection: Sight
I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is 'Disappear Here' and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.Collection: Light
I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.Collection: Fear
I've been accused of being very vain about my apathy.Collection: Apathy
Yes. Yes I am. I am a completely demented misogynist.Collection: Demented
I think we've all lost some kind of feeling.Collection: Thinking
A child should never even think about being a "good son." A parent decides that fate for the child. The parent encourages that. Not the child himself. And the "perfect dad"? I shudder at thinking what that may be.Collection: Children
Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.Collection: Book
I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)Collection: Wind
Rock 'n' roll. Deal with it.Collection: Rocks
I write books to relieve myself of pain. That's the prime motivator to write. Period.Collection: Pain
...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.Collection: Real
Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.Collection: Sky
Do you wear a diaphragm everywhere you go?' I want to scream, but stop myself because the idea really excites me.Collection: Ideas
I think in life, there are certain choices you make that are timeless and universal, and don't necessarily have anything to do with the particulars of a certain decade.Collection: Thinking
Adjust my dreams for me.Collection: Dream
It's like my characters, all my men are Dad and me in a mess; all my female characters are smart and hopeful, like Mom just trying to make the best of things.Collection: Mom
Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.Collection: Writing
what's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.Collection: Want Something
Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever.Collection: Sex
That's how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That's how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That's how I became the boy who wouldn't save a friend. That's how I became the boy who couldn't love the girl.Collection: Love
I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care.Collection: Worry
And it struck me then, that I liked Sean because he looked, well, slutty. A boy who had been around. A boy who couldn't remember if he was Catholic or not.Collection: Sex
You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue youCollection: Writing