Quotes By Chuck Palahniuk

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.

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.

You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

I'm only confrontational with my friends.

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

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

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.

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

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

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

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

We kind of deny the stages of life.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

I haven't shoplifted since I was 13.

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

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.

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

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

I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it's good to add more emotion and chaos.

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

I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.

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.

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.

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

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

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

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

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

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.