Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can't shut them up.

Even if I overcompensate, nobody will ever want me. Not Seth. Not my folks. You can’t kiss someone who has no lips. Oh, love me, 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

My life has been about living like a monk and looking like a priest so that people will come up to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and it might as well be me.

Books can create a depth of story, a background of information and ideas, that televison and movies can't. Sure, the television shows may shock, but only on a superficial level. They'd never risk market share to really explore the issues. They report, but don't analyze or suggest any new ways for living our lives.

Masochism is a valuable job skill.

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

The air will always be to filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a Barbie doll, a vacuum cleaner. We're all such products.

Intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don't want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they're emotional or spiritual. I'm trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them.

Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.

It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire.

First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.

So often with beginning writers, the story that they want to start with is the most important story of their life - my molestation, my this, my horrible drug addiction - they want to tell that most important story, and they don't have the skills to tell it yet, so it ends up becoming a comedy. A powerful story told poorly becomes funny, it just makes people laugh behind their hands.

Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

When a regular person gets sick, they take an aspirin. When a writer gets sick, they take notes.

I'm only confrontational with my friends.

Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

On game shows, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer and dryer pair.

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...

I'm never going to have to work. None of my descendants are ever going to have to work; this is going to make me so much money. It was such a letdown when I realized that wasn't my invention.

A writer’s job is to cultivate what can go wrong.

My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.

A knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

Taste is such a changing thing. Every age our tastes change. But the things that really last aren't necessarily the best or the worst or the most loved things, but they're the things that make the biggest impression.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.

Just each of us being me, me, me first. The murderer, the victim, the witness each of us thinks our role is the lead. Probably that goes for anybody in the world.

Every stage of life has its own form of power, and we're always sort of terrified as to whether we can make the jump to the next form of power.

Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.

He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you're gone.

If you flee from the things you fear, there's no resolution.

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.

The only funny part about Colonial Dunsboro is maybe it's too authentic, but for all the wrong reasons. This whole crowd of losers and nutcases who hide out here because they can't make it in the real world, in real jobs — isn't this why we left England in the first place? To establish our own alternate reality. Weren't the Pilgrims pretty much the crackpots of their time? For sure, instead of just wanting to believe something different about God's love, the losers I work with want to find salvation through compulsive behaviors.

I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.

I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

It's nice to see something more pathetic than I feel right now.

The damaged love the damaged. True fact.

I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more.

Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.

If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?