Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Everyone wants to feel special - attain a special status among their pears- but not too special. Most kids want to be special the same way their friends are

~ Chuck Palahniuk

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things.Only end them.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I am nothing, and not even that.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

No, we love war.War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.“It's the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.”We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.

~ 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

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings.

~ 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

My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

With a book, you're guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it's one of the few advantages books still have.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.

~ 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

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

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don't want to distract myself from anything.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Of the big horror movies of the '70s, you have 'The Omen,' 'The Sentinel,' 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'The Stepford Wives,' 'Burnt Offerings' - these are all romantic fatalist movies where there's a sort of glimmer of hope... but darkness wins.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The best fights don't occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I know that I'm going to die and that you're going to die. I can't do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I'm always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away from other people, and my writing sucked. Now I have a laptop; I can do the most tedious part of my job in a public place.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk