Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Your folks are god, you love them and you want to make them happy but you still want to make up your own rules.

You'd be surprised just how fast you can close the door on your past. Learn needlepoint. Make a stained-glass lamp.

The girls you meet are never very far from their worst-case scenario.

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.

All these stupid rocks," I say, "what's your goal?"
"This isn't about getting something done," Denny says. "It's about the doing, you know, the process."
"But what are you going to do with all these rocks?"
And Denny says, "I don't know until I collect enough."
"But what's enough?" I say.
"I don't know, dude," Denny says, "I just want the days of my life to add up to something.

There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up.

I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo."
"Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?

New carpet will exude poisonous formaldehyde for up to two years after it'd been laid. I know the feeling.

It's hard to explain to someone who's never had the experience - the unmistakable, life-altering moment when you read a book and realize that someone out in the world has read your mind and put into words all the thoughts and ideas crashing around inside your own head. For me, it was like Don Swanstrom

The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

This is be­ing loved with­out the risk of lov­ing any­one in re­turn.

This book is, in a way, a scrapbook of my writing life. From shopping the cathedral flea market in Barcelona with David Sedaris to having drinks at Cognac with Nora Ephron just months before she died. To the years of sporadic correspondence I had with Thom Jones and Ira Levin. I've stalked my share of mentors, asking for advice.
Therefore, if you came back another day and asked me to teach you, I'd tell you that becoming an author involves more than talent and skill. I've known fantastic writers who never finished a project. And writers who launched incredible ideas, then never fully executed them. And I've seen writers who sold a single book and became so disillusioned by the process that they never wrote another. I'd paraphrase the writer Joy Williams, who says that writers must be smart enough to hatch a brilliant idea - but dull enough to research it, keyboard it, edit and re-edit it, market the manuscript, revise it, revise it, re-revise it, review the copy edit, proofread the typeset galleys, slog through the interviews and write the essays to promote it, and finally to show up in a dozen cities and autograph copies for thousands or tens of thousands of people…
And then I'd tell you, "Now get off my porch."
But if you came back to me a third time, I'd say, "Kid…" I'd say, "Don't say I didn't warn you.

Scratch any fortune and you'll find blood only a generation or two back ... child labor in mines or mills ... Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.

If you flee from the things you fear, there's no resolution.

Sorry, mom.
Sorry, God.

I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

Marla doesn't have testicular cancer. Marla doesn't have tuberculosis. She isn't dying. Okay in that brain brain-food philosophy way, we're all dying, but Marla isn't dying the way Chloe was dying.

All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.

As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case. After I gave up television, I found I could carry longer and longer stories or ideas in my head and put them together until I was carrying an entire short story. That's pretty much when I started writing.

Branch Bacardi, star of The Da Vinci Load, To Drill a Mockingbird, The Postman Always Cums Twice, Chitty Chitty Gang Bang, The Twilight Bone, A Tale of Two Titties...

Such language," Babette says. "Why don't you just take a dump in my ears!

These days, people aren't going to fill stadiums to get preached at by somebody who isn't beautiful.

If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes.

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.

My stories tend to bring people from isolation into community - with at least one other person, usually with a whole community of people - so that they find themselves accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.

Your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.

When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we'll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

You can kill a lifetime without feeling anything but skin.

Imagine," Tyler said, "stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.

When I first started writing, there was no way I'd write a sex scene. That just seemed impossible. That's why in "Fight Club" all the sex happens off-screen. It's all just a noise on the other side of the wall or the ceiling. I just couldn't bring to write in a scene like that. So one of the challenges with "Choke" was I wanted to write sex scenes until I was really comfortable just writing them in a very mechanical way.

Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the nation rots.

She reflected on her time in Paris and thought how it seemed as if she'd spent half her life drinking wine in bed and covered with contusions. This, it occurred to her, was how it must feel to be Melanie Griffith.

Jump back twenty years to the white house where I grew up with my father shooting super-8 movies of my brother and me running around the yard. Jump to present time with my folks sitting on lawn chairs at night, and watching these same super-8 movies projected on the white side of the same white house, twenty years later.

Katherine's theory is that everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives us the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits. "We just accumulate more and more strange people," she says. "All we are are the fugitives and refugees.

I'm always identifying some fallacy in my own life. I'm sort of making fun of myself by exploring and unpacking just why I'm sort of automatically thrown to be a certain way.

Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.

Somehow people have been sold on the idea that only professionals can entertain them, that only professionals can sing or tell jokes. And people are cut out of this creativity loop, and creativity is being limited to these large, centralized voices.

Never, ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.

Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.

What's up with you? How come you're being like this?' Because it's the truth. This is the world we live in.

The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.

Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboros, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled. There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible.

Our misery. This suppression of our rational mind is the source of inspiration. Suffering takes us out of our rational self-control and lets the divine channel through us.

Here was our future of cheese-food and aerosol propellants, Styrofoam and Club Med on the moon, roast beef served in a toothpaste tube.

No matter what happens, it's always now.

Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours.

Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable around disastrous house fires than they are around anal sex.

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

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.

You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.

That would be like breaking a mirror for showing you the truth.

By the time you turn thirty, your life is about escaping the person you've become in order to escape the person you've become in order to escape the person you started as.

Young people want mirrors. Older people want art.

Ev­ery­one else I could call is dead.

Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.

Rant said that view of time was set up so folks won't live forever. It's the planned obsolescence we've all agreed to ... 'Nothing says you have to swallow this,' Rant told me. 'You can always just die.

The slogan for America is 'Not Good Enough'. Nothing's ever fast enough. Nothing's big enough. We're never satisfied. We're always improving…

Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle," Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside.

This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don't. And every year it burns, there's more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve.

Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year.

The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What's left of them...

"When you think about it from a native plant perspective," Oyster says, "Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist."

Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.

We're all of us haunted and haunting.

If people thought you were dying they gave you their full attention.

The nouvelle cuisine of anarchy. Barium nitrate in a sauce of sulfur and garnished with charcoal. That's your basic gunpowder. Bon appetit.

Even a killer needs to talk, to tell his life story, so bad he'll come and sit beside a grave or a rotting body and just blab, blab, blab at it for hours. Until he makes sense. Until the killer can convince himself with the story of his new reality. The reality that--he was right.

I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful.

Think about George Orwell's three-minute hate from the novel '1984' and how that left everyone sort of exhausted and able to live their boring humdrum lives. If our lives are going to continue being unfulfilled and boring, perhaps we do need some sort of short-term violent chaos incorporated into them, to make them more palatable.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

I write in a noisy, distracting world so the books can be read there.

Arguing that God doesn't exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn't exist because they couldn't see them.

You just don't know what I've been through this past year.

You can't be beautiful until you feel beautiful.

If you believe Leondard, this is how Hell breaks people down
by permitting them to act out to greater and greater extremes, becoming vicious caricatures of themselves, earning fewer and fewer rewards, until they finally realize their folly. Perhaps, I muse over the telephone, that is the one effective lesson which one learns in Hell.

It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.

Then all you can do is get lost in the tiny de­tails of ev­ery day do­ing the same tasks over and over.

A guy's calling to say he's failing algebra II.
Just as a point of practice, I say, Kill yourself.
A woman calls and says her kids won't behave.
Without missing a beat, I tell her, Kill yourself.
A man calls to say his car won't start.
Kill yourself.
A woman calls to ask what time the late movie starts.
Kill yourself.
She asks, Isn't this 555-1327? Is this the Moorehouse CinePlex?
I say, Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself.

If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
His words, in His Bible. The Book of Genesis, chapter eleven
So our God, our all -powerful God got so scared He scattered the human race across the face of the earth, and shattered their language to heep His children apart.
An almighty God this insecure? Who pits his children against each other, to keep them weak. This is the God we're supposed to worship?

Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity, you will become a statistic.

You're a projectionist and you're tired and angry, but mostly you're bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie. This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there's the flash of an erection. Tyler does this.

I say, no. You've used me enough.
"If you don't cooperate, we'll go after Marla."
I say, lead the way.

And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.

Your whole life, she says, you're searching for disaster - you're auditioning disasters - so you'll be well rehearsed when the ultimate disaster finally arrives.

If you're going to read this, don't bother.

Ignore how it feels when the only real talent you have is for hidding the truth. You have a God-given knack for commiting a terrible sin. It's your calling. You have a natural gift for denial. A blessing.

How folks lay claim to a loved one is they give you a name of their own. They figure to label you as their property.

Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.

We were all runing from something. Vaginoplasty. Aging. The future.

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

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

Optimism is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.

I am helpless.
I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things.
My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it "Entourage."
This is how bad your life can get.

And the moment she says hello, I wouldn't hang up. I'd say, 'Hi. What's happening? Tell me every little thing.

The girl's lover was gone, but his shadow was still there.

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.

Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes around. We're the rocks. And what happens to us - the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse - why, that's just the water and sand to
erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.

That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

Which is worse, Hell or nothing? Only if we're caught and punished can we be saved.

Real smarts begin when you quit quoting other people ... ... ..

Nothing is static.

I asked Tyler what he'd been fighting.
Tyler said, his father.
Maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves.