Why are they making rules that say my lover can stay in the United States if they're foreign or share my health care benefits because I'm straight - but if you're gay, you can't have that?

I was like a total cliched '80s child. I had Barbies, obviously, as well as My Little Ponies and Cabbage Patch Kids, but I used to destroy them. I used to draw all over their faces and cut off their hair.

While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.

I usually write in my kitchen, which is a large, octagonal room that looks into woods - three big windows look out into the trees.

The best thing about getting a flu shot is that you never again need to wash your hands. That's how I see it.

Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.

The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.

My parents divorced about the same time the movie 'The Parent Trap' came out, about two twins at camp who scheme to get their parents back together. I had that same fantasy.

I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There's such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it - Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Alexander McQueen, Heath Ledger.

If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.

I've got two dogs; they're Boston terriers, and they're allowed everywhere.

We don't have friends, so we watch 'Friends' on TV.

So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies; they're lived through what we watch on television - they're not actual events in our life.

Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.

When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.

I think Chris Brown gets kind of dismissed as a gay writer, and I think Chris's books are really, really smart. I wish his books sold a little more widely.

Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.

I haven't had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case.

Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

My writing process isn't a very organized thing.

I get a lot of letters from women who insist that 'Fight Club' is not just a guy thing. They insist that women have the same rage and need the same outlet.

People said that 'Fight Club' would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.

Movie brawls tend to be bloodless and quick.

David Fincher is a genius.