Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Art never comes from happiness

~ Chuck Palahniuk

they should let some people into the library by prescription only

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.There is no free will. There are no variables.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Angel says that rich people don't like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

To Mr. Jones, she said, imagine you're looking up at a blue sky, and imagine a tiny airplane skywriting the letter Z. Then let the wind erase the letter. Then imagine the plane writing the letter Y. Let the wind erase it. Then the letter X. Erase it. Then the letter W. Let the wind erase it.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

You gain power by pretending to be weak.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

If you never have sex you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It's by having sex that adolescents first rebel.And if you never have sex, you never grow beyond everything else your parents taught you. If you never break the rule against sex, you won't break any other rule.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Real smart begins when you quit quoting other people.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Rachel hadn’t invented the dangers of toxoplasmosis, she’d gone online and built an airtight case. This wasn’t crazy talk. Neurobiologists had linked T. gondii to suicide and the onset of schizophrenia. All caused by exposure to cat poop. Some studies even suggested that the toxo brain parasites chemically coerced people to adopt more cats. Those crazy cat ladies were actually being controlled by an infection of single-cell invaders.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

What if reality is nothing but some disease?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Even if you tell yourself Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot. Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong... you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot. No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Good news didn't seem real until you'd told at least a dozen friends.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we don't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose ... watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Sex pretty much cures everything.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The tiny space, the toilet, two hundred strangers just a few inches away, it's so exciting, the lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you're double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some creativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. You'll be amazed how time flies.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

A woman eats to feed her pussy. Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's amazing what a woman will read into if you by accident, say I love you. Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's the last frontier to conquer, other people, strangers, the jungle of their arms and legs, hair and skin, the smells and moans that is everybody you haven't done. The great unknowns. The last forest to devastate. Here's everything you've only imagined.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I was very invested in love but it was just this long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's about getting off.

~ 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

Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

No, it’s not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

They placed their bets with such self righteous bravado, but I’m the one who lost.

~ Chuck Palahniuk