Chuck Palahniuk

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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."

— Chuck Palahniuk

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.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

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.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

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.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

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.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Every play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. Even Sound and light can only go so fast.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

— Chuck Palahniuk

We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.

— Chuck Palahniuk

No detail is too minor to note.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion. Someone's always spraying the air with their mood.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous 'heavy' in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. She said, "Even absolute corruption has its perks.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Our footsteps echo against the concrete floor. The steel roof hums with rain. And she says, 'Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?'

— Chuck Palahniuk

These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics."

— Chuck Palahniuk

Until you deal with your real personal issues, you'll never be able to control yourself.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

Doctor Sarah didn't start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show," Mona says. "She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people."

— Chuck Palahniuk

In order to save the world, Jesus Christ suffered for about thirty-six hours on the cross. I am willing to suffer an eternity in hell for the same cause.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The more people die, the more things stay the same.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies.

— Chuck Palahniuk

In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine.

— Chuck Palahniuk

This culling poem is a blessing. Why do you think it was created in the first place? It will save millions of people from the slow terrible death we're headed for from disease, from famine, drought, from solar radiation, from war, from all the places we're headed.

— Chuck Palahniuk

"The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie.

— Chuck Palahniuk

If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.

— Chuck Palahniuk

You’ve thrown down the gauntlet. You’ve brought my wrath down upon your house. Now, to prove that I exist I must kill you. As the child outlives the father, so must the character bury the author. If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it.It’s hard to call any of my novels “fiction.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?

— Chuck Palahniuk

To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole.

— Chuck Palahniuk

"It's not a matter of right and wrong," Mr. Whittier would say. Really, there is no wrong. Not in our minds. Our own reality. You can never set off to do the wrong thing. You can never say the wrong thing. In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take--what you do or say or how you choose to appear--is automatically right the moment you act.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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.

— Chuck Palahniuk

In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering. It was erosion. It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process.

— Chuck Palahniuk

For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman. This woman who just wanted to die.

— Chuck Palahniuk

You can't unfuck a kid. Once you fuck a kid, you can't get that genie back in the bottle.

— Chuck Palahniuk

As a fundraiser, our first idea was 'Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.'

— Chuck Palahniuk

The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look.

— Chuck Palahniuk

We should forgive God...

— Chuck Palahniuk

Chapter 19, Absolution

— Chuck Palahniuk

That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight. Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.

— Chuck Palahniuk

If there's a trick to doing a job you hate... Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more.

— Chuck Palahniuk

We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we'll create one.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us," Mr Whittier says, "It's how we digest our lives. Our experiences.

— Chuck Palahniuk

If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.

— Chuck Palahniuk

"I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong again." p76

— Chuck Palahniuk

Some stories, Mr.Whitter would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up. p288

— Chuck Palahniuk

Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

A book is as private and consensual as sex.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport.

— Chuck Palahniuk

That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Their teeth white, as if they never used teeth for anything except to smile.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.

— Chuck Palahniuk

I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise," he says, "you'll always be controlled by the world.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room masturbating and making money.

— Chuck Palahniuk

After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.

— Chuck Palahniuk

You will always have some excuse not to live your life.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour.

— Chuck Palahniuk

What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.

— Chuck Palahniuk

If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, 'I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew.' Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU.

— Chuck Palahniuk

It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life.

— Chuck Palahniuk

In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Yes, and I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism.

— Chuck Palahniuk

If the living are haunted by the dead. Then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes."

— Chuck Palahniuk

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 just fine.

— Chuck Palahniuk

It's exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

What is the real purpose behind the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? They seem like greater steps toward faith and imagination, each with a payoff. Like cognitive training exercises.

— Chuck Palahniuk

The amazing miracle of death, when one second you're walking and talking, and the next second you're an object.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Someday you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me.

— Chuck Palahniuk

I don't want to die without any scars.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

The lucky ones are just born dead.

— Chuck Palahniuk

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?

— Chuck Palahniuk

A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"

— Chuck Palahniuk

Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?

— Chuck Palahniuk

Because supposedly those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.

— Chuck Palahniuk

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

— Chuck Palahniuk

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead.

— Chuck Palahniuk