Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

I don't remember the hotel rooms or the airports but I always remember the events.

A writer's job is to cultivate what can go wrong. You're always looking for that dramatic arc of where things can fail.

I disconnect the telephone to keep the outside world in it's correct place.

The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing and so she won't commit to anything.

People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.

you ever been trapped in a world where you're everyone's worst nightmare?

Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?

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

No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.

Everyone's in their own personal coma.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.

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

I don't want to die without a few scars.

The damaged love the damaged. True fact.

Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing . . .

The first step to eternal life is you have to die.

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.

Part of her doing suicide intervention is my caseworker has to mix me another gin and tonic.

Our real discoveries come from chaos.

For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.

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

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.

You gain power by pretending to be weak.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.

Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

I want to find something else, unknowable, some place that's not on the map. A real adventure.

Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?

No mat­ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.

I'm never going to have to work. None of my descendants are ever going to have to work; this is going to make me so much money. It was such a letdown when I realized that wasn't my invention.

Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.

Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

You can say anything if enough people will listen.

Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.

If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?

Real writers write because they love to write. They don't write for public acclaim.

The more things you own, the more they own you.

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

The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

Masochism is a valuable job skill.