Chuck Palahniuk Quotes & Sayings

The wild daisies and Indian paintbrush whizzing past are just the genitals of a different life form — Chuck Palahniuk

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

About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I'm really angry, I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota. — Chuck Palahniuk

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.
This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.
Only God has the right to surprise His children with death. — Chuck Palahniuk

Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you. — Chuck Palahniuk

Regret, Daisy knew, was the only confirmation of a well-lived life. If you didn't occasionally go too far, you weren't going anywhere. — Chuck Palahniuk

What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were. — Chuck Palahniuk

They'd told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent — Chuck Palahniuk

Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dish washing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur. If you don't know what comes next in the story ... clean your toilet. Change the bed sheets. For Christ sakes, dust the computer. A better idea will come. — Chuck Palahniuk

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. — Chuck Palahniuk

That guy behind me on the airplane? He's been kicking my seat because he hates me. He's kicking my seat because he hates me and I'm gonna kill him. When we get off this plane, I'm gonna make eye contact. I'm gonna kill that guy. And all of that is just stuff in my head, but it's good to get rid of that stuff. — Chuck Palahniuk

With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels. — Chuck Palahniuk

That's how a good story works. It changes how you feel. It brings you to a greater appreciation, a greater joy, of your own existence. — Chuck Palahniuk

There's a famous quote regarding Polanski. Perhaps Jack Nicholson said it, perhaps someone else, but it goes, "Polanski is the five-foot Pole I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole." So, yes, the world seems to despise him. I, however, love his work. It's so much funnier and well-constructed than the pompous stuff of Kubrick. Polanski balances between camp and horror in much the same way Billy Wilder did. — Chuck Palahniuk

And there, nestled against Bob's bitch tits I found my release. — Chuck Palahniuk

I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise. — Chuck Palahniuk

You had a near-life experience, the mechanic says. — Chuck Palahniuk

I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's just about getting off. Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love. — Chuck Palahniuk

And maybe men say they're glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that's just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can't do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses - any advantages men appear to have are pretty token.
You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus. — Chuck Palahniuk

There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over. — Chuck Palahniuk

A male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women. — Chuck Palahniuk

I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language. — Chuck Palahniuk

The first step to eternal live is you have to die. — Chuck Palahniuk

Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn't know that hope is just another phase you'll grow out of. — Chuck Palahniuk

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.
At least the ancient Greeks were being honest. — Chuck Palahniuk

And what happens doesn't happen in words. I want to smother all the French beaches I'll never see. Imagine stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around Rockefeller Center. — Chuck Palahniuk

I know so many writers who are a hundred times better than me and have longer, greater ideas than mine, but they gave up; they stopped. The biggest talent you can have is determination. — Chuck Palahniuk

Each romance, the type of self-destructive gesture Hedda Hopper would call "marry-kiri".Instead of plunging a sword into one's stomach, you repeatedly throw yourself on the most inappropriate erect penis. — Chuck Palahniuk

Now is the autumn of our ennui. — Chuck Palahniuk

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too. — Chuck Palahniuk

Every family has its scriptures, but most can't articulate them — Chuck Palahniuk

Some mythological fat asswipe drives our national economy. — Chuck Palahniuk

Cyanide is natural. So is arsenic. — Chuck Palahniuk

I came to Party Crashing because accidents happen. People you love will die. Nothing you treasure will last forever. And I need to accept and embrace that fact. — Chuck Palahniuk

The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring. — Chuck Palahniuk

A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
"Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living. — Chuck Palahniuk

The problem with proximity friends is, they move away. They quit or get fired. — Chuck Palahniuk

Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junk yard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We'd go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody. — Chuck Palahniuk

You realize it's not wooden stakes that kill vampires. It's all the emotional baggage and letdowns they have to carry around for century after century. — Chuck Palahniuk

You had a near life experience. — 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

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed. — Chuck Palahniuk

Tyler lies back and asks, "If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing?"
I say, goodnight.
The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling and Tyler says, "Clawing at the lid of her coffin. — Chuck Palahniuk

Your life isn't about doing one perfect 'thing' and then falling down dead. It's more like going to church or writing a book. You do it over and over, always trying to be a little bit better. Then you die. — Chuck Palahniuk

Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide. — Chuck Palahniuk

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books. — Chuck Palahniuk

At home, you'll sometimes wake up in your dark bed with the terror you've fallen asleep in the booth and missed a changeover. — Chuck Palahniuk

All these mystics, throughout history, all over the world, they all found their way to enlightenment by physical suffering. — Chuck Palahniuk

I am Joe's Complete Lack of Surprise. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

She wanted a choice beyond: Housewife versus lawyer. Madonna versus whore. An option not mired in the lingering detritus of some Victorian-era dream. — Chuck Palahniuk

This isn't about love and hate, Helen says. It's about control. People don't sit down and read a poem to kill their child. They just want the child to
sleep. They just want to dominate. No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have your own way. The masochist bullies the sadist into
action. The most passive person is actually an aggressor. — Chuck Palahniuk

All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad. — Chuck Palahniuk

That's the best revenge of all: happiness. Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone having a good fucking laugh. — Chuck Palahniuk

Funerals are all abstract ceremony. — Chuck Palahniuk

It's one thing for my parents to behave all secular humanist and gamble with their own eternal souls; however it's altogether not all right that they also gambled with mine: They placed their bets with such self-rightous bravado, but I'm the one who lost. — Chuck Palahniuk

Pretty much nobody is getting their emotional needs met. — Chuck Palahniuk

I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more. — Chuck Palahniuk

You become smart when you don't need to quote someone anymore.
I am still stupid: I quoted Chuck Palahiniuk — Chuck Palahniuk

Through people locked together crotch to crotch, face to face, crotch to face, crotch to ass, and ass to face, I dig a pit. — Chuck Palahniuk

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. — 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

You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching. — Chuck Palahniuk

Besides.
Eternity was going to seem like forever.
With the crowds of smiling people smiling at me in the dark, me who spent my life cleaning bathrooms and mowing the lawn, I told myself, why rush anything?
I'd backslid before, I'd backslide again. Practice makes perfect.
If you could call it that.
I figured, a few more sins would help round out my resume.
This is the upside of already being eternally damned.
I figured, Hell could wait. — Chuck Palahniuk

Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself. — Chuck Palahniuk

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. — Chuck Palahniuk

The people who really, actually loved us, they'd beg us to go. To fulfill our dreams. Practice our craft. And they would love us when we all came back. — Chuck Palahniuk

The only place where you can really surprise or shock the reader, or make someone laugh, is on the lower righthand corner - the very last panel - so as you turn the page, the payoff is in the upper lefthand panel. To pace every story so that there's a setup and a payoff at the page turn was a huge challenge; it's a part of the medium and you really have to learn what can be done in the medium. — Chuck Palahniuk

During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure,and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could ever go into wide distribution. — Chuck Palahniuk

I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed, sense of rejection. — Chuck Palahniuk

As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more? — Chuck Palahniuk

This woman is Pocahontas. She is Athena and Hera. Lying in this messy, unmade bed, eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O'Hara. With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia. To Marie Antoinette. Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia. Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta. Lying here, Lady Windermere. Opening her eyes, Cleopatra. Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy. Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history. — Chuck Palahniuk

I am nothing, and not even that. — Chuck Palahniuk

In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display. — Chuck Palahniuk

The demon say's "Do you view sexual acts between individuals of the same gender to be an abomination?" ...
"Do you approve," the demon says, "of marriage between individuals of differing racial backgrounds?"
The demon continues without hesitation, asking, "Should the Zionist state of Israel be allowed to exist?"
Question after question, I'm stumped. Even fingers crossed. The paradox: Is God a racist, homophobic, anti-semantic ass? Or is God testing to see if I am? — Chuck Palahniuk

I'm fascinated by the whole issue of arousal addiction, which seems to be mostly a problem for young men. — Chuck Palahniuk

No matter what else you came up against, if you could smile and laugh while a monkey did you with chestnuts in a dank concrete basement while somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake — Chuck Palahniuk

You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways. — Chuck Palahniuk

I hate how on TV they have to fill so many minutes. It means they have to put in anything, and by doing so they sort of trivialize news; news becomes this commodity that they need to fill dead time between commercials with. — Chuck Palahniuk

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 smoky eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's a 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

Rant Casey used to say, "No matter what happens, it's always now ... " Talk about cryptic.
I think what Rant meant was, we live in the present moment of reality, and no matter what's come before, no matter how much we loved a person or a dog, when it attacks us we'll react to that moment of danger. — Chuck Palahniuk

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. — Chuck Palahniuk

You'll need to suffer to make any real art. — Chuck Palahniuk

Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing. — Chuck Palahniuk

Why do the lives of writers seem so ... train-wrecky? — Chuck Palahniuk

No, none of us seem so very real.
We're only supporting characters in the lives of each other.
Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe. — Chuck Palahniuk

People can't concieve of a virtue in someone else that they can't coneive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weake. You're addicted to self-abuse. You're a liar. People are always ready to believe the opposite of what you tell them. — Chuck Palahniuk

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world. — Chuck Palahniuk

I embrace my own festering diseased corruption, — Chuck Palahniuk

It is a hundred-year-old witch book, bound in human skin and probably written in ancient cum ... YOU lick it! — Chuck Palahniuk

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

I told him to buy land, my mum says, they're not making it anymore. — Chuck Palahniuk

Fat," the mechanic says, "liposuctioned fat sucked out of the richest thighs in America. The richest, fattest thighs in the world." Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we'll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out. At twenty bucks a bar, these are the only folks who can afford it. "The richest, creamiest fat in the world, the fat of the land," he says. "That makes tonight a kind of Robin Hood thing. — Chuck Palahniuk

People don't listen, they just wait for their turn to talk. — Chuck Palahniuk

We're the culture that cried wolf. — Chuck Palahniuk

What you have to do is work on yourself. Make yourself attractive through the things you do, the principles you hold dear, and the goals you've set for yourself. Then you can try to get a woman. You can't expect her to love you just because you love her back. That only happens when the woman is weak. — Chuck Palahniuk

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. — Chuck Palahniuk

You melt and swell at that moment. For that moment, nothing matters. Look up at the stars and you're gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the horns are blaring around you. The headlights are flashing high and low and high in your face, and you will never have to go to work again. — Chuck Palahniuk

The sixth rule of Fight Club: No shirt, no shoes. — Chuck Palahniuk

At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. — Chuck Palahniuk