Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

I think that young people are less attached to items and objects now. They're less attached to consuming things and accruing things because they see it as a system that doesn't necessarily work and give them a sense of adulthood and fulfillment. They're much more in tune with wanting to achieve a skill, a form of self-expression, or a body of knowledge that fulfills the same function, fulfills their adulthood.

After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life

I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smoky eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's a kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive "let them eat cake" type of chauvinism.

Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.

If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.

So if reality is all a spell, and you don't really want what you think you want... If you have no free will. You don't really know what you know. You don't really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?

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.

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.

The bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life. Our real discoveries come from chaos. - Brandy Alexander

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

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.

Sorry, mom. Sorry, God.

Part of her doing suicide intervention is my caseworker has to mix me another gin and tonic.

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

A moment is all you can expect from perfection.

As the stupidest person in the room, I always had the most to gain.

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.

You're a product of our language, and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you. Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way you can get out.The world is your cradle and your trap.

For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose ... watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.

It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

I say let me never be complete, I say may I never be content,I say deliver me from Swedish furniture, I say deliver me from clever arts, I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth,I say you have to give up! I say evolve, and let the chips fall where they may!

You love me. You ignore me. You save my life, then you cook my mother into soap.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become.

To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.

These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.

You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.

To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.

The little boy smiled back at all the angry faces glaring in at him. And the little boy blew kisses.

Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

If you're going to read this, don't bother.

The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.

Writing is like sex, if it's difficult you're not doing it right.

The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing and so she won't commit to anything.

Some people still think knowledge is power.

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.

Because after you've crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them. And there's no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.

In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.

You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

I suppose it’s comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.

Make me into anything, but just love me.