Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held.

These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that could happen.

A knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

I'm living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live. I tell myself: I deserved this. This is exactly what I wanted.

You are permanent, but this life is not.

I try to get centered: Watching white moon face The stars never feel anger Blah, blah, blah, the end

A writer’s job is to cultivate what can go wrong.

We opened our hearts. Hear me, heal me, save me, believe me.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.

You love me. You ignore me. You save my life, then you cook my mother into soap.

Everyone has something wrong. And for a while, her heart just sort of flat lined.

Because I can't hit bottom, I can't be saved.

There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

Everything is still falling apart.

It's not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky.

Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.

As the stupidest person in the room, I always had the most to gain.

My books are always about someone obtaining a power to replace the previous sort of power that they held.

That's how a good story works. It changes how you feel. It brings you to a greater appreciation, a greater joy, of your own existence.

If you make people laugh too much, their blood becomes - I believe it is acidic as opposed to alkaline. It changes the oxygen level in the blood, and people are likelier to pass out at that point.

Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.

After you hear even the shortest great story, it should fill you with a little bit of fear.

My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst.

I know so many writers who are a hundred times better than me and have longer, greater ideas than mine, but they gave up; they stopped. The biggest talent you can have is determination.

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.

Everyone wants to be tested and challenged. Everyone would like a good, honest fight to exhaust their frustrations.

Screenwriters get paid a hell of a lot more money but their level of frustration seems to be so high that I don't want that.

For the most part my friends can always be more entertaining than the tube ever can be.

When I see people talking on the internet about me or my work it's almost always more a description of themselves and so I never really think of myself as anything more than just who I always was.

Everyone is equal and everyone is forced to participate; you can't just be a spectator.

I'm working harder than I have ever worked in my entire life, but what the hell, my life is my job now, and my job is my life and that's the way it should be.

More and more people are defining themselves not by what they are about, but by what they are against, what they are overcoming, the thing that is wrong with them.

Language is what books do very well and movement is what movies does very well.

The ultimate joke was the idea that capitalism would eat its own feces in order to make money, that would make fun of itself if capitalism thought there was a buck in it.

People take conventional ways that other people have always decorated their cars, and use them as ways of giving other people permission to approach them.

Cults make people sing so hard for so long - because it over-oxygenates the blood and sets them up to faint.

I'm fascinated by the whole issue of arousal addiction, which seems to be mostly a problem for young men.

I spend most of my life just listening to people.

The money is in television. Books are not the dominant medium of our time, so fewer people will create them. In a sad way, books have become a form of "comfort food" we expect to lull us to sleep.

I see so many tattoos of my stuff on people - tattoos of my book covers, tattoos of quotes . . . it's kind of daunting sometimes.

Ultimately, everyone is acting out of what they feel is the best choice. In a way, they're all trying to improve the world. And I think that those basic choices make the world a better place.

My books are more about people experimenting with different identities and social models in a short-term way before they can break through to something authentic.

I write because it's a way of presenting something without having to be there.

Since we do operate in a binary world, if there's something that cannot be this or that, it drives us crazy.

I'm really glad that I spent my twenties messing around and having disaster after disaster - with people who were doing likewise - because it's really my greatest treasure now.

At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

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

Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you.

If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?'Clawing at the roof of her coffin.