Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

Most people would never admit it, but they'd been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.

The tiny space, the toilet, two hundred strangers just a few inches away, it's so exciting, the lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you're double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some creativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. You'll be amazed how time flies.

Some mythological fat asswipe drives our national economy.

Years of living in the hope that what you'll get will be better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling worse in the hope that you might look better.

Waiters will always pee in soup, people will always fall in love.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

You have to keep recycling yourself.

You’re training a new employee,' says Mrs. Clark, 'to take over your boring old job.' When you raise a child.

I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.

Don't do this. I love you. Don't shut me out.

How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.

Yes, these are bruises from fighting and I'm okay with that.

Unless we have that moment of chaos, followed by the emotional release of realization, nothing will be remembered.

Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.

The on­ly thing I know is ev­ery­thing you love will die.

I tagged a first-timer one night at fight club. That Saturday night, a young guy with an angel’s face came to his first fight club, and I tagged him for a fight. That’s the rule. If it’s your first night in fight club, you have to fight. I knew that so I tagged him because the insomnia was on again, and I was in a mood to destroy something beautiful.

They're just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.

The one thing I cannot stand is when I do interviews, when I interview people, and I listen to the tapes and I hear myself talking and sort of stumble and stammer, or I hear the horrible sound of my own voice, or God forbid I see myself on video, there is that complete revulsion with seeing how I occur in the world.

Somehow people have been sold on the idea that only professionals can entertain them, that only professionals can sing or tell jokes. And people are cut out of this creativity loop, and creativity is being limited to these large, centralized voices.

These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.

The career of a movie star consists of helping everyone else forget their troubles. Using charm and beauty and good cheer to make life look easy.

the world is the cradle and your trap.

Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.

We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.

The best fights don't occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.

The government says Rant's alive because they need a villain. The kids say he's alive because they need a hero.

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting you.

Now is the autumn of our ennui.

Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.

Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity, you will become a statistic.

The only place where you can really surprise or shock the reader, or make someone laugh, is on the lower righthand corner - the very last panel - so as you turn the page, the payoff is in the upper lefthand panel. To pace every story so that there's a setup and a payoff at the page turn was a huge challenge; it's a part of the medium and you really have to learn what can be done in the medium.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and adressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. [...] The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, I'll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me.

Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.

A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything- tangible or intangible- again. To never trust or wonder.

Love is a skill you learn.

Imagine a plague you catch through your ears.

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

We're all going overnight express delivery straight to Hell.