Quotes By Chuck Palahniuk

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

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

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.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

Masochism is a valuable job skill.

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.

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.

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

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

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.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

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

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

I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.

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.

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.

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.

It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

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.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

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

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

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.