Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

I always thought I'd write when I retired - when I turned 65. But by the time I was 33, to tell you the truth, I was a little bored with drugs and sex, and I thought I'd do the writing thing.

Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks.

I'm in love. So kill me.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?

Proof that no investment is yours forever.

It's okay to cry as long as you're faking it.

Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.

If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

The old rule about how a thing of beauty is a joy forever, in my experience, even the most beauteous thing is only a joy for about three hours, tops. After that, she'll want to tell you all about her childhood traumas. Part of meeting these jail girls is it's so sweet to look at your watch and know she'll be behind bars in half an hour.

The cancer I don't have is everywhere now.

I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.' A spinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined.

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

Regret, Daisy knew, was the only confirmation of a well-lived life. If you didn't occasionally go too far, you weren't going anywhere.

The moment the world declares a person to be immortal, at that moment the person will strive to prove the world wrong. In the face of glowing press releases and reviews the most heralded women starve themselves or cut themselves or poison themselves. Or they find a man who's happy to do that for him.

"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives."

We're so structured and micromanaged, this isn't a world anymore, it's a damn cruise ship.

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.

Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead.

Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

Peter used to say that an artist’s job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.

they should let some people into the library by prescription only

It's not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky.

Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.

People will listen to you only when they know you're dying, otherwise they're just waiting for their turn to talk.

Get married before the sex gets boring or you'll never get married.

The police are asking through the bedroom door, why did I make a batch of strawberry daiquiris before I called them? Because we were out of raspberries. Because, can't they see, it just does not matter. Time was not of the essence.

My stories tend to bring people from isolation into community - with at least one other person, usually with a whole community of people - so that they find themselves accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.

What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.

Anything you can aquire is only another thing you'll lose.

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

There's a big difference between "not caring" or being "nihilistic" about a topic and simply not being enrolled by the drama presented by other people. Just because my characters choose not to react in standard, socially-appropriate ways - that does not mean they don't care. They just reject ordinary dramas.

When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.

If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more.

Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells “stop!”, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: the fights are bare knuckle. No shirt, no shoes, no weapons. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.

I'm always looking for context in which people tell stories. In "Fight Club" it's these support groups for dying people, and then in "Choke" it's 12-step recovery groups. In one novel it's artists' colonies, in another novel it's a diary form that submariners' wives typically keep so that when their husband comes back from serving on a submarine they have an accounting of their spouse's time. So I'm always looking for, number one, a non-fiction context - because you can tell a more outrageous story if you use a non-fiction form.

Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep...wait for the boy who kisses your forehead, who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats, who holds your hand in front of his friends, who thinks you're just as pretty without makeup on. One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares and how lucky his is to have you....The one who turns to his friends and says, 'that's her.'

No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.

Some people are just born human, the rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.

A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?

If it is the case that love does survive death, then you may consider this to be a happy ending. Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Happily ever after or not.

Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.

Since we do operate in a binary world, if there's something that cannot be this or that, it drives us crazy.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.