Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about.

The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.

They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful. Because now she looks so—bad.

In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.

Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb.

You’re training a new employee,' says Mrs. Clark, 'to take over your boring old job.' When you raise a child.

Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.

you're a product just as much. a product of a product. the people who design cars, they're products, your teachers, products. the minister in your church, another product.

A male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.

Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you're a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.

This is passive-aggression in action.

Cassie Wright knows, the moment you make yourself available to any man, he starts to take you for granted

and i can't stand the idea of being alone. i can't bear the thought of being free.

Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.

Look up at the stars and you're gone.

This is the greatest momemt of your life and your out missing it

I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed, sense of rejection.

To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs.

I am the all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world.... I am the toxic waste by-product of God's creation.

If your body is a temple, you can pile up too much deferred maintenance. If your body is a temple, mine was a real fixer-upper.

Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up.

Funerals are all abstract ceremony.

There's always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.

Narrator: You had to give it to him: he had a plan. And it started to make sense, in a Tyler sort of way. No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.

Without true chaos, we can never have true peace.

I haven't shoplifted since I was 13.

I have a lot of money.

When a regular person gets sick, they take an aspirin. When a writer gets sick, they take notes.

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

I really believe it's the moments we can't talk about that become the rest of our lives. It's the moments we can't process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.

I write compulsively. I've got so many ideas, and I love to do it so much, I can't not do it. I write the way some people do drugs.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine

I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.

Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It's kind of like trick-or-treating.

Writers should be able to fully deduct from their taxes all writing-related expenses, including alcohol, parking tickets, court judgments, fines for lewd public behavior, Zoloft, and cigarettes.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As if everything's fine.

We all have some proper noun to blame.

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

If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.

Your folks are god, you love them and you want to make them happy but you still want to make up your own rules.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

This is our world now, and those ancient people are dead.

There's no escaping fate, it just keeps going. Day and night, the future just keeps coming at you.

You can't be beautiful," Brandy says about a thousand times, "until you feel beautiful.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

Years of living in the hope that what you'll get will be better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling worse in the hope that you might look better.

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.