Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything... I wish, just once, I could say, 'This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.

No, none of us seem so very real. We're only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.

It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.

This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.

I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything.

Anything pretty,' Claire will tell you, 'it's only for sale because no one wants it.

Give me romance. Flash. Give me denial.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.

Life is short, death is forever

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.

And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.

Let me be the ring leader in your guilt gang-bang.

Some of us are lucky enough to fall in love once or twice but the luckiest of us are those who find that someone they simply can't live without and have the pleasure of falling in love with them day in and day out for the rest of their lives. Relationships aren't about simply falling in love once and being done with it, they're about loving someone until the end of your days and growing that love endlessly.

With insomnia, you're never really awake; but you're never really asleep.

You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.

People take conventional ways that other people have always decorated their cars, and use them as ways of giving other people permission to approach them.

Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.

I'm living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live. I tell myself: I deserved this. This is exactly what I wanted.

At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor.

Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.

Every character sees the world through a framework of education and experience that they're proud experts about. To write a character, find out what they know best, and THEN you'll know how they'll describe a "hot day." Or a "pretty girl."

Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be.

The world can be a lot bet­ter than we set­tle for. All you have to do is ask.

We all have this moment, when your folks first see you as someone not growing up to be them.

The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

Inside me is the same desperate hope I have watching the ravenous dead and thinking, Oh please, oh please, oh please. The craving inside of me is to be clutched at by some dead girl. To put my ear to her chest and hear nothing. Even getting munched on by zombies beats the idea that I'm only flesh and blood, skin and bone. Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held.

I write because it's a way of presenting something without having to be there.

We all have some proper noun to blame.

The lucky ones are just born dead.

Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.

Suicide is very contagious.

You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.

Really, just looking around, you feel a twinge of pity for the poor souls who succeeded in getting past the Pearly Gates. One can't help but picture the lackluster VIP lounge in Heaven, a kind of nonalcoholic ice-cream social starring Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mahatma Gandhi. Hardly anyone's idea of a "with-it" social register.

It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.

Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered.

I really believe it's the moments we can't talk about that become the rest of our lives. It's the moments we can't process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.

Your folks are god, you love them and you want to make them happy but you still want to make up your own rules.

The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.

Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.