Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

The more things you own, the more they own you.

You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.

The ultimate joke was the idea that capitalism would eat its own feces in order to make money, that would make fun of itself if capitalism thought there was a buck in it.

As the child outlives the father,so must the character bury the author.

Also consider that someday, when you’re dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.

People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.

Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.

Your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. Then puberty makes you Satan, just because you want something better.

Language is what books do very well and movement is what movies does very well.

Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.

I think we're in an age starved for genuine experiences, instead of cathartic phony experiences through the media, structured, engineered experiences. And those are the fast food, the masturbation of experience. They don't really exhaust any aspect of ourselves; they don't make us any stronger.

You spend your entire life becoming God and then you die.

Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That's how beautiful she looks.

To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days.

My books do have a sort of romantic community at the end - people coming together. But on a more basic level, I always see them as being about power, in the same way that Harry Potter books are pitched to a population of young people who really have no power.

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.

You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception. Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet where your wife and kid wait. Silence, not heaven, would be reward enough.

You could stab a knife right through my heart and you'd be too late.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.

At the last minute, I couldn't wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on someone's front stoop.

Just let your hand drop; and let fate decide for you.

The things you used to own, now they own you.

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.

His computer password is "password.

You kill strangers deliberately so you don't accidentally kill the people you love.

A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.

If I turn up suicided in the morning, it was murder.

this is the upside of already being eternally damned

You ever wonder if Adam and Eve were just the puppies God dumped because they wouldn't house-train?

Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb.

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.

If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes.

I am not loved. I am not a beautiful soul. I am not a good-natured, giving person. I am not anybody's savior.

Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

A good story isn't the one that shuts everyone down and sort of leaves them in silent awe. A good story is one that, even before you finish the anecdote, you can see their eyes shining because it has so resonated with something from their own lives that everyone in the group has a version of the same story and they cannot wait to tell it, and that they're going to compete to make their version even more extreme than your version. So your version is just a seed.

I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

I'm always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.

The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.

I still love him so much I'll hide any amount of conjugated estrogen in his food. So much I'll do anything to destroy him.

Everything is still falling apart.

You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble.