Palahniuk Quotes & Sayings

The security guy asked my name address and phone number, and then he asked me what was the difference between a condom and a cockpit. — Chuck Palahniuk

No matter luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you chooe, you'll nevver be totally happy. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

As the child outlives the father,so must the character bury the author. — Chuck Palahniuk

That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways. — 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

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

We're all going overnight express delivery straight to Hell. — Chuck Palahniuk

To be or not to be. God's gift to animals is they don't get a choice. — Chuck Palahniuk

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. — Chuck Palahniuk

What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women. — Chuck Palahniuk

Some of us are lucky enough to fall in love once or twice but the luckiest of us are those who find that someone they simply can't live without and have the pleasure of falling in love with them day in and day out for the rest of their lives. Relationships aren't about simply falling in love once and being done with it, they're about loving someone until the end of your days and growing that love endlessly. — Chuck Palahniuk

I guess my most prized pop culture possession is a signed first edition of the book 'Fight Club' by Chuck Palahniuk. — Jen Lancaster

A woman calls from Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She's sure of it. Now she's only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all heir luggage, and their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof.
Bermuda triangulated. — Chuck Palahniuk

I thought 'Fight Club' was great as David Fincher's version. — Chuck Palahniuk

Anymore, no one's mine is their own. — Chuck Palahniuk

The lye clinging in the exact shape of Tyler's kiss is a bonfire or a branding iron or an atomic pile meltdown on my hand at the end of a long, long road I picture miles away from me. Tyler tells me to come back and be with him. My hand is leaving, tiny and on the horizon at the end of the road. — Chuck Palahniuk

We are all connected on the inside. Your ass is just the far end of your mouth. — Chuck Palahniuk

I can manage my own pain. I can drink. I can go to the doctor and get a prescription. I can exercise. I can write a story about it. I've done it a million times! But I don't want to see the people I love tortured and suffering. — Chuck Palahniuk

Someone bent on suicide won't have much sense of humor left. — Chuck Palahniuk

I'm really glad that I made a lot of mistakes, poorly chose my friends throughout my twenties, and didn't have a rocket trajectory that set me on one path without making any mistakes or having any setbacks. The older I get, the more I realize that it's all of these failed, horrible things from my past, and the stories that they generated, that are the things I will draw on for the rest of my life. — Chuck Palahniuk

Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks. — Chuck Palahniuk

...actual happiness only happens by accident — Chuck Palahniuk

My books didn't fit a marketing niche. — Chuck Palahniuk

At the store, they have one-hundred-percent-recycled toilet paper," Marla says. "The worst job in the whole world must be recycling toilet paper." I — Chuck Palahniuk

When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she'd read a dozen a month. — Chuck Palahniuk

This is passive-aggression in action. — Chuck Palahniuk

For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

Let's all embrace someone near us. Pick someone special to you. Tell this someone how you feel. — Chuck Palahniuk

I haven't had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. 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. — Chuck Palahniuk

It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. — Chuck Palahniuk

It's just such a big commitment," Brandy says, "being a girl, you know. Forever."
Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if there was
someone, just one person who would love her, who could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the hormones and make-up and the clothes and shoes and surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little. — Chuck Palahniuk

The best thing about getting a flu shot is that you never again need to wash your hands. That's how I see it. — Chuck Palahniuk

I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest. The agent said that sounded pretty realistic. — Chuck Palahniuk

A moment is all you can expect from perfection. — Chuck Palahniuk

You know that old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off. — Chuck Palahniuk

My life has been about living like a monk and looking like a priest so that people will come up to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and it might as well be me. — 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

Want to talk third wave feminism, you could cite Ariel Levy and the idea that women have internalized male oppression. Going to spring break at Fort 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 patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself.
A damsel too dumb to even know she's in distress. — 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

It sounds as if you'd like to be God. — Chuck Palahniuk

What stops you here is what stops your entire life.
The air will always be too filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

We want you, not your money. As long as you're at fight club, you're not how much money you've got in the bank. You're not your job. You're not your family, and you're not who you tell yourself. You're not your name. You're not your problems. You're not your age. You are not your hopes. You will not be saved. We are all going to die, someday. — Chuck Palahniuk

People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden. — Chuck Palahniuk

Despite my lifetime of declining rich desserts, my evenings spent jogging, regardless of all my careful moderation and self-discipline - I'm trapped, wadded inside a shell of steel and aluminum. My body, violated in countless places by fragments of broken glass. My low-cholesterol blood rushes to abandon me in hot, leaping spurts. Despite all my care, the heart-attack victim and I will both be just as dead. — Chuck Palahniuk

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened. — Chuck Palahniuk

Every takeoff and landing, when the plane banked too much to one side, I prayed for a crash. — Chuck Palahniuk

To my mind, those who can, do. Those who can't, gripe. — Chuck Palahniuk

You have to give up! you have to give up!
You have to realize that someday you will die,
Until you know that, you are useless! — Chuck Palahniuk

I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that. — Chuck Palahniuk

Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue. — Chuck Palahniuk

The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our heads 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

I'm never going to have to work. None of my descendants are ever going to have to work; this is going to make me so much money. It was such a letdown when I realized that wasn't my invention. — Chuck Palahniuk

This isn't so much romance as it is opportunity [victor mancini] — Chuck Palahniuk

The one thing I cannot stand is when I do interviews, when I interview people, and I listen to the tapes and I hear myself talking and sort of stumble and stammer, or I hear the horrible sound of my own voice, or God forbid I see myself on video, there is that complete revulsion with seeing how I occur in the world. — Chuck Palahniuk

You're not getting this back you know. Consider it an asshole tax. — Chuck Palahniuk

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person? — Chuck Palahniuk

My private history in terms of people in my life who are dead is very easy to discuss. I don't feel those people can be threatened or intruded upon now. But I am enormously protective of the people who are currently in my life, my existing friends and family. That is where the curtain is drawn. — Chuck Palahniuk

After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life — Chuck Palahniuk

There are bodies buried everywhere you just have to know where to look. — Chuck Palahniuk

Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person. — Chuck Palahniuk

I try to get centered: Watching white moon face The stars never feel anger Blah, blah, blah, the end — 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

You always kill the one you love. — Chuck Palahniuk

We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion. — Chuck Palahniuk

On the other side of the handrail, the hallway's gray marble floor looks as if we've climbed a stairway through the clouds. — Chuck Palahniuk

When you ate her tuna casserole, you didn't talk or flip through a National Geographic. Your eyes and ears stayed inside your mouth. Your whole world kept inside your mouth, feeling and careful for the little balled-up tinfoils Irene Casey would hide in the tuna parts. A side effect of eating slow was, you naturally, genuinely tasted, and the food tasted better. Could be other ladies were better cooks, but you'd never notice. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

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. — Chuck Palahniuk

My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

The way to succeed is giving people a noble reason to do something despicable. And my patients ... my clients, my characters are doing kind of scamming, deceptive things but they're doing them for noble reasons. Typically to be loved, to be accepted, to trick someone into embracing them and care for them. — Chuck Palahniuk

It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. — Chuck Palahniuk

To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs. — Chuck Palahniuk

What Tyler says about the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy something beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground — Chuck Palahniuk

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived. — Chuck Palahniuk

Prepare to evacuate soul in ten, in nine, eight.
Chloe's splashing through the ankle-deep back-up of renal fluid from her failed kidneys.
Death will commence in five.
Five, four.
Around her, a parasitic life spray paints her heart.
Four, three.
Three, two.
Chloe climbs hand-over-hand up the curled lining of her own throat.
Death to commence in three, two.
Moonlight shines in through the open mout ...
h.
Prepare for the last breath, now.
Evacuate.
Now.
Soul clear of body.
Death commences.
Now. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. — Chuck Palahniuk

The last story you should write is the most important story. You should start with a story that is just an amusing, entertaining, fun story to write and learn your writing chops with the least important things before you start applying them to the most important things. — 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

More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea . . .
That if enough people looked at you, you'd never need anybody's attention ever again.
That if someday you were caught, exposed, and revealed enough, then you'd never be able to hide again. There'd be no difference between your public and your private lives.
That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you'd never want to own or do another thing.
That if you could eat or sleep enough, you'd never need more.
That if enough people loved you, you'd stop needing love.
That you could ever be smart enough.
That you could someday get enough sex.
These all became the little boy's new goals. The illusions he'd have for the rest of his life. These were all the promises he saw in the fat man's smile — Chuck Palahniuk

There will always be an underground. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

It's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody. — Chuck Palahniuk

Our all-powerful God got so scared He scattered the human race across the face of the earth, and shattered their language to keep His children apart. — Chuck Palahniuk

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose. — Chuck Palahniuk

,dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw.
Chapter I. — Chuck Palahniuk

Next, I'm holding a bag of clothes, being herded toward an open door filled with sunlight. My briefs are still looped around my ankles, so I'm waddling, my erection swinging in front of me like a blind man's cane, and the talent wrangler has the nerve to say, 'Thank you for coming... — Chuck Palahniuk

Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia. — Chuck Palahniuk

Give me needy emotional whining bullshit.
Flash.
Give me self-absorbed egocentric twaddle.
Christ. — Chuck Palahniuk

I would pay snakes to bite her. — Chuck Palahniuk

Towles burn. Bathroom inferno! Chanel No. 5, it burns. Oil paintings of racehorses and dead pheasants burn. The reproduction Oriental carpets burn. Evie's bad dried flower arrangements, they're these little tabletop infernos. Too cute! Evie's Katty Kathy doll, it melts, then it burns. Evie's collection of big carnival stuffed animals - Cootie, Poochie, Pam-Pam, Mr. Bunnits, Choochie, Poo Poo and Ringer - it's fun-fur holocaust. Too sweet. Too precious. — Chuck Palahniuk

Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture." And — Chuck Palahniuk

Cancer will be like that, I tell Marla. There will be mistakes, and maybe the point is not to forget the rest of yourself if one little part might go bad. — Chuck Palahniuk

Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish. — Chuck Palahniuk