Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Chuck Palahniuk serves raw, darkly funny insights that hit like a punch of originality for fans of bold fiction.

32 quotes

1. I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying 'We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything.' And I'm like, 'Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that's all I did.'

2. I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.

3. It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

4. Why have I sold out? You think I'm supposed to grow old, beating some trite old protest drum that people don't hear anymore? Please; protest is now just a backdrop for a Diesel clothing ad in a slick fashion magazine. My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way. It's time - for me, at least - to be clever and seduce people by entertaining them. I'll never be heard if I'm always ranting and griping.

5. How sweet! You still believe in death... that's just so... quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me.

6. The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

7. I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion's leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night - as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here's Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public.

8. All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss.

9. Going to spring break at Ft. Lauderdale, getting drunk and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of a patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to know she is even in distress.

10. I don't care what they do with my book so long as the fucking cheque clears.

11. Choke (novel)

12. Diary (novel)

13. Fight Club (novel)

14. Invisible Monsters

15. Lullaby (novel)

16. Survivor (novel)

17. Haunted (novel)

18. Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey

19. This is your life and its ending one minute at a time.

20. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

21. What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.

22. “It’s not that I want to get mar­ried. I ad­mire guys who can com­mit to a tat­too.”

23. “[W]hat makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.”

24. We'll never be as young as we are tonight.

25. Just for the record, how I feel right now is very terrific.

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

27. Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.

28. Waiters will always pee in soup, people will always fall in love.

29. Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

30. Being tired isn't the same as being rich, but most times it's close enough.

31. You have to jump into disaster with both feet.

32. You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.