Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

The weather today is partly angry, leading to resignation and ultimatums.

My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst.

The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.' Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.

I want to have your abortion.

I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.

What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that could happen.

As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents' dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you're never really finished as a person.

My point is, that if I'm honest, my life is all about me.

The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine

Just for the record, how I feel right now is very terrific.

The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

Public taste changes and the aesthetic of a culture changes over time, so the idea isn't to appeal to the aesthetic of the moment and what people will like right now; the idea is to somehow keep yourself in the public memory so that as taste evolves it will eventually come to embrace your thing. So, it's about writing to be remembered rather than writing to be liked.

Now this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue collar Nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven't already done.

Everything you see is based on fact of a event thats already happen, Even light only travels so fast.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

I'm not really into comfort books. There are too many of those as it is. Just sort of narcotic books, like my grandmother used to read. They have value like Paxil has value, but there's plenty of them in the world already. There's a shortage of confronting, stimulating, exciting books.

According to Plato, we don't learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.

Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.

There will always be an underground.

I'm not so much a good friend as I'm the savior who wants you to worship him forever.

The girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked.

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.

Don't rush or force the ending. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.

We don't need women. There are plenty other things in the world to have sex with, just go to a sexaholics meeting and take notes. There's microwaved watermelons. There's the vibrating handles of lawn mowers right at crotch level. There's vacuum cleaners and beanbag chairs. Internet sites. All those old chat room sex hounds pretending to be sixteen-year-old girls. For serious, old FBI guys makes the sexiest cyberbabes.

A shadow of a reflection of an image of an illusion.

There's no escaping fate, it just keeps going. Day and night, the future just keeps coming at you.

Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things - they save you.

Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.

Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It's kind of like trick-or-treating.

Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.

No matter what happens, it’s always now.

New carpet will exude poisonous formaldehyde for up to two years after it'd been laid. I know the feeling.

I'm really glad that I made a lot of mistakes, poorly chose my friends throughout my twenties, and didn't have a rocket trajectory that set me on one path without making any mistakes or having any setbacks. The older I get, the more I realize that it's all of these failed, horrible things from my past, and the stories that they generated, that are the things I will draw on for the rest of my life.

All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.

Anytime my work can coax bodily fluids out of someone, I'm happy.

Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience.

You don't have ideas when you're sitting in that sort of sterile little place, and you're not around people. The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone. I just need that dynamic of other people around me to get my work done.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have.

The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.

If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.

The same architect who designed the Seattle fair's futuristic Science Center, with its lacy Gothic arches and spires, Minoru Yamasaki, was hired to design the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Seattle had promised fairgoers a glimpse of the world that would exist in 2001. That year eventually unfolded as something less than the dream we'd imagined.

Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. And the phone rang and Tyler answered. "If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't." May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.

In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.

Where every day doesn't start with an alarm clock and end with the television.

I don't want to die without a few scars.

Recycling and speed limits are bullshit. They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.