Chuck Palahniuk's Quotes

Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.

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

Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.

The answer is there is no answer.

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.

I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.

Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.

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

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

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

There will always be an underground.

Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.

I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.

I don't know if you ever really feel like you've made it.

I haven't shoplifted since I was 13.

I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

I will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.

I'm only confrontational with my friends.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

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

Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.

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

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.

We kind of deny the stages of life.

I'm always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.

Any 'artist' makes a living by expressing what others can't - because they're unaware of their feelings, they're too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood.

I try to forget about the expectation that's out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I'm not trying to please them. I've spent a huge amount of time not communicating with those folks and denying that they exist.

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.

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.

I believe in something. But I don't believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

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?

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.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

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.

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.

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

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

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

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?

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

If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can.

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

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.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

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

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.

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

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

Masochism is a valuable job skill.

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.