Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories.

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

I try to get centered: Watching white moon face The stars never feel anger Blah, blah, blah, the end

Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

There are the most fantastic, beautiful things and people out there. It’s up to you to find them.

Burn the Louvre, and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.

To preserve yourself as the center of the world, to stay your own best authority on everything, your own expert on all topics, infallible, omniscient. Always, every time of the month, forever: Use birth control.

Anymore, no one's mind is their own.

A male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

Picture the moment when your mom and dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.

Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.

Just for the record, the weather today is increasing turmoil with a possible physical and emotional breakdown.

Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here.

Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

Some writers research in order to write. I write in order to research topics that interest me. Especially if I can meet with other people, in forums from illness support groups to phone-sex hotlines, and learn what other people know best.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It’s like stealing something valuable they don’t even know they own.

Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.

With my eyes closed, I ask if she knows how this will all turn out. "Long-term or short-term?" she asks. Both. "Long-term," she says, "we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after." Really? "Really," she says. "So don't sweat it.

Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.

For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?

We hear the ambient noise of children singing. We hear lions and tigers roar. Hyenas laugh. Some jungle bird or howler monkey declares its existence, screeching a maniac's gibberish. Our entire world, always doing battle against the silence and obscurity of death.

More and more people are defining themselves not by what they are about, but by what they are against, what they are overcoming, the thing that is wrong with them.

Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.

Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night.

To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence.

That's how a good story works. It changes how you feel. It brings you to a greater appreciation, a greater joy, of your own existence.

What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God.

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

This deluded little rube who really thought the future would be any better. If you just worked hard enough. If you just learned enough. Ran fast enough. Everything would turn out right, and your life would amount to something.

Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.

When someone walks in and you say "a six-foot-tall man," you miss the opportunity to describe what a six-foot-tall man would look like to your narrator, because how the narrator describes a six-foot-tall man says more about the narrator than about the man.

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

My writing has to excite people and depict or include their experiences. That's part of my process - to go out and interact with people. It's very much like an archival process. I understand that the Brothers Grimm would go out and get people talking so they could document folk tales that weren't being documented any other way. I try to offer a little bit of myself - some experience from my life that evokes stories in other people.

Optimism is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

Her mom and dad are both doctors and want her to follow her dream, not turn out the way they have, no matter how much it costs them.

If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can.

This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.

You can say anything if enough people will listen.

I can manage my own pain. I can drink. I can go to the doctor and get a prescription. I can exercise. I can write a story about it. I've done it a million times! But I don't want to see the people I love tortured and suffering.

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody. The kid never knew the man's name. But he never forgot that smile. "Hero" isn't the first word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

I take pens and I write on the inside of my arm. When I'm with people and somebody says a really fascinating anecdote, or fact, or phrase, I'll write it on the inside of my arm. At the end of the day, I'll take the very best things that are on my arm and I'll copy them into a notebook that I always carry and only when the weather is absolutely terrible will I really key the very best of that notebook into the computer. At that point, it's all sort of censored twice - only the best things go from the arm to the book and only the best things go from the book to the computer.

Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?