Words matter. These are the best Chuck Palahniuk Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
Discovering the ‘impossible’ ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.
You realize you have no control over how you’re perceived.
Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.
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.
If nothing else, there’s comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.
Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.
Movie brawls tend to be bloodless and quick.
Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… it’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.
People would ask me to autograph their bodies and then the next time I’d see them on tour they’d have my autograph tattooed. I decided I wouldn’t write on people anymore, but I’d give them arms and legs and if they wanted those autographed I’d do that.
I come from generations of farmers.
Since September 11, 2001, the real world has become too scary for a lot of people to be with – all the time.
Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.
If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.
While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.
Once I start writing, I can’t stop.
A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.
I tell everyone I interact with what I’m working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
There will always be an underground.
In ‘Diary,’ the motto really is: ‘Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?’ It coaches us to be aware of our motives and not just be a reaction to the circumstances around us.
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.
I write nothing but contemporary romances.
Every woman is just a different kind of problem.
Sometimes, like in ‘Invisible Monsters,’ I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.
Arguing that God doesn’t exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn’t exist because they couldn’t see them.
When I visit my brother in South Africa, I order things I’ve only seen in zoos. Little deers and kudu, all the mammals you would never think of eating.
‘Romance’ is based on my entire creative process. I fall in love with an idea, obsess over it, isolate myself with it, and when I eventually introduce it to my friends, they all tell me that it’s stupid.
The best fights don’t occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.
No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
My way of being with people is probably incredibly unhealthy, in that I’ll be incredibly social, and I won’t write a word for maybe a year, and I’ll just be with people, going to parties and soaking up stories, and just sort of recharging all of my ideas.
I think it’s more important to write something that brings men back to reading than it is to write for people who already read. There’s a reason men don’t read, and it’s because books don’t serve men. It’s time we produce books that serve men.
Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.
Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn’t know anything.
The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.
Anytime my work can coax bodily fluids out of someone, I’m happy.
Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.
My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly – all these make for great stories.
We kind of deny the stages of life.
With a book, you’re guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it’s one of the few advantages books still have.
Portland is quickly becoming one of those lovely, lush Third World countries where kinda-rich people retire with their money.
You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.
I thought ‘Fight Club’ was great as David Fincher’s version.
What is the real purpose behind the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? They seem like greater steps toward faith and imagination, each with a payoff. Like cognitive training exercises.
Your life isn’t about doing one perfect ‘thing’ and then falling down dead. It’s more like going to church or writing a book. You do it over and over, always trying to be a little bit better. Then you die.
In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You’d be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it.
At the age of 31, I realized, ‘Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.’
I haven’t had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. 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.
Men want to make the best use of time and want to see how something can inform them and give them a stronger sense of power.
Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.
The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense.
I will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.
People said that ‘Fight Club’ would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.
The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.
Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it’s not the king any more.
We kind of deny the stages of life.
If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.
I don’t know if you ever really feel like you’ve made it.
There’s a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.
In 2008, while the film version of my book ‘Choke’ was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother – the plot of Choke – while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.
What we don’t understand we can make mean anything.
When I first read the story ‘Guts’ in workshop – my fellow writers that I’ve been meeting with for almost 20 years – they laughed; they didn’t have any kind of shock reaction.
Personal identity seems like it’s just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’ to Jay Gatsby in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you’re given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?
You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.
The young men, they look to me for a story they can get nowhere else, a challenging risky story.
Jack Palance was my distant uncle – that’s the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous ‘heavy’ in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.
