Quotes By Chuck Palahniuk

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.

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

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

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.

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.

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.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

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

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?

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.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

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

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?

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

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

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.

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

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.