Chuck Palahniuk

Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.

When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds ...
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If we all lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, life would be much simpler.

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where ...
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A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast ...
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A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.

A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.

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.

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Anytime my work can coax bodily fluids out of someone, I'm happy.

Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking.

Any 'artist' makes a living by expressing what others can't - because they're unaware of their feelings, they're too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood.

As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents' dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you're never really finished as a person.

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.

At the age of 31, I realized, 'Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.'

At school I was lazy. But I started working when I was 15, washing dishes at a local truck stop restaurant. I was really, really bored with school, and I wanted to get a job as fast as I could. School was just so easy. There was just no challenge to it.

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

Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.

Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.

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

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation... they're inseparable.

David Fincher is a genius.

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.

Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn't know anything.

Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.

Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.

Every author has to eventually write a food book.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

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

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.

Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it's not the king any more.

Few things in life seem more sexy than a banned book.

For me, writing is a kind of coping mechanism.

For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.

Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman's right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of 'Rosemary's Baby,' or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to 'Stepford Wives.'

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

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

I always thought I'd write when I retired - when I turned 65.

I come from generations of farmers.

I believe in something. But I don't believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.

I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.

I don't know if you ever really feel like you've made it.

I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.

I dread the promotion part of my job. It's agony, especially compared to the private, at-home joy of writing. But being a grown-up means doing every part of the larger task.

I don't think 'Guts' could get financed as a movie.

I have a lot of money.

I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.

I get a lot of letters from women who insist that 'Fight Club' is not just a guy thing. They insist that women have the same rage and need the same outlet.

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.

I haven't shoplifted since I was 13.

I live by fallacy. 'If I get enough nice Ikea furniture, I'll be a grown-up.' Then I catch myself. Or, 'If I get off by myself, away from the stress of modern life, I'll be OK.' Then I catch myself.

I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it's good to add more emotion and chaos.

I just don't want to die without a few scars.

I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances, they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.

I never think I'm making fun of my culture. In fact I'm making fun of myself, because I catch myself doing some very stupid things.

I love the power of words - no music or special effects - and I want to demonstrate that power.

I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won't have a career.'

I tell everyone I interact with what I'm working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.

I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.

I think Chris Brown gets kind of dismissed as a gay writer, and I think Chris's books are really, really smart. I wish his books sold a little more widely.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There's such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it - Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Alexander McQueen, Heath Ledger.

I think it's more important to write something that brings men back to reading than it is to write for people who already read. There's a reason men don't read, and it's because books don't serve men. It's time we produce books that serve men.

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.

I think that I am responsible for the death of thousands of things and for the misery of thousands of people, just through the things that I buy and how I live my life, and these are not things that ever deserved to die.

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

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

I used to work as a volunteer in a hospice, but I don't have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything, so I was what they call an escort. I would take people to the support groups every night, and I would have to sit sort of on the sidelines so I could take them back to hospice at the end of the meeting.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

I try to forget about the expectation that's out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I'm not trying to please them. I've spent a huge amount of time not communicating with those folks and denying that they exist.

I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.

I usually write in my kitchen, which is a large, octagonal room that looks into woods - three big windows look out into the trees.

I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.

I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.

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.

I wouldn't get nearly as many books written if I lived in New York. The Columbia Gorge is fantastic. When the sun shines, I just want to be outdoors.

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

I will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

I write nothing but contemporary romances.

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

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

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

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?

If we all lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, life would be much simpler.

If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.

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

If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.

If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever.

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.

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

If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.

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.

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.

I'm trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.

I'm only confrontational with my friends.

In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.

In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.

In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You'd be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it.

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.

In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.

In 'Diary,' the motto really is: 'Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?' It coaches us to be aware of our motives and not just be a reaction to the circumstances around us.

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.

It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can't shut them up.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.

I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.

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

Masochism is a valuable job skill.

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.

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.

Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.

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.

Men want to make the best use of time and want to see how something can inform them and give them a stronger sense of power.

Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.

Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.

Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone, they are with people.

My books are all fantastically sentimental.

My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.

My father used to call me 'bird bones' and, well, the name fits.

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.

My books didn't fit a marketing niche.

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

My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for export to Israel. It took us years to get through.

My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.

My goal is never to make fun of religion.

My goal is more to be remembered. They'll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.

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.

My grandfather was hit over the head by a crane boom in Seattle. Some of the family claimed he was never a violent, crazy person before that. Some say he was. It depends who you believe.

My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way.

My personal theory is that younger audiences disdain books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter.

My parents used to fight a lot, and I think they fought a lot at night, and they would turn the television up to hide the sound of their fighting.

My parents divorced about the same time the movie 'The Parent Trap' came out, about two twins at camp who scheme to get their parents back together. I had that same fantasy.

My stories always have these twisted happy endings, and the boy always gets the girl.

My publisher's been shipping me to comic-cons, and it seems that my readership overlaps perfectly with the comic-con crowd.

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.

My writing process isn't a very organized thing.

My way of being with people is probably incredibly unhealthy, in that I'll be incredibly social, and I won't write a word for maybe a year, and I'll just be with people, going to parties and soaking up stories, and just sort of recharging all of my ideas.

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.

Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion... What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.

Once I start writing, I can't stop.

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.

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

Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they're able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they decided.

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

People have to deal with their issues together, they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

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

People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens.

People said that 'Fight Club' would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.

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.

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?

People would ask me to autograph their bodies and then the next time I'd see them on tour they'd have my autograph tattooed. I decided I wouldn't write on people anymore, but I'd give them arms and legs and if they wanted those autographed I'd do that.

Portland is quickly becoming one of those lovely, lush Third World countries where kinda-rich people retire with their money.

'Romance' is based on my entire creative process. I fall in love with an idea, obsess over it, isolate myself with it, and when I eventually introduce it to my friends, they all tell me that it's stupid.

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.

Since September 11, 2001, the real world has become too scary for a lot of people to be with - all the time.

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.

So much of 'Fight Club' was a rant against fathers.

So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies, they're lived through what we watch on television - they're not actual events in our life.

Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

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

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

Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It's kind of like trick-or-treating.

The answer is there is no answer.

The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.

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

The first step to eternal life is you have to die.

The bright future is that readers are accepting more varied forms of stories.

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

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

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.

The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

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.

The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.

The third person allows characters to really attack themselves. We all do this - attack ourselves - every hour of our lives.

The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me, the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense.

The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

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

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

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

There will always be an underground.

To be honest, I hate silence.

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.

There's a television show, 'Hoarders,' where people have those homes filled with stuff. Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.