Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

People who don't want to get on with their lives, and don't want to accept responsibility for the direction of their lives want to hang out with other people who don't want to accept responsibility or move on, and so you find that your entire culture around you are people who are just like you, because that's what's comforting.

My goal is more to be remembered. They'll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.

We want you, not your money. As long as you're at fight club, you're not how much money you've got in the bank. You're not your job. You're not your family, and you're not who you tell yourself. You're not your name. You're not your problems. You're not your age. You are not your hopes. You will not be saved. We are all going to die, someday.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it.

You can’t fool people into loving you.

It’s a fun playtime. Please, don’t kill it with big words.

The damaged loves the damaged.

Self improvement is masturbation.

What I did was pour out about a gallon of Chanel Number Five and put a burning wedding invitation to it, and boom, I'm recycling.

Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper. My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.

It's interesting because when David Fincher was making "Fight Club," he said, "It's a romance." And it really is. Almost everything I ever write is just a romance. And that needed to be sort of pointed up at the end of "Fight Club." The film has a very different ending than the book does.

With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.

As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more?

There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

We went sailing one time, and he wore a Speedo, and any smart woman should know that means bisexual at least.

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.

Art never comes from happiness.

The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate.

Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.

How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?

Someone bent on suicide won't have much sense of humor left.

I see so many tattoos of my stuff on people - tattoos of my book covers, tattoos of quotes . . . it's kind of daunting sometimes.

To repeat, the way you get to the huge, impossible yes is, you start collecting a lot of easy, small yeses.

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren’t. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire. People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won't settle for just a human being.

After you hear even the shortest great story, it should fill you with a little bit of fear.

We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.

As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case. After I gave up television, I found I could carry longer and longer stories or ideas in my head and put them together until I was carrying an entire short story. That's pretty much when I started writing.

Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up.

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation they're inseparable.

The photographer in my head says: Give me peace. Flash. Give me release. Flash.

How I feel is cheap and used, dirty and humiliated. Dirty and tricked and thrown away.

Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this gun is.

No, it's not fair, but what makes Earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You'll find out for yourself soon enough. It won't help the situation for you to get all upset.

It only takes one mistake and nothing else you ever do will matter. No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you'll always be known for that one poor choice.

Everyone thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation.

I used rebellion as a way to hide out. We use criticism as a fake participation.

Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies. It's no wonder Waltraud Wagner, the Austrian Angel of Death, convinced her friends to kill with her. It just seems natural. You and me against the world.

The only thing that separates us from the animals... is we have pornography.

Having nothing to lose is the new wealth.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

I think it's just a matter of time before everybody realizes that I'm kind of a romance novelist ... that these are all stories about people kind of falling back in love or struggling with relationships. Even Fight Club was just a big romantic ending.