Quotes By Chuck Palahniuk

Masochism is a valuable job skill.

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

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

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.

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

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

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

I have a lot of money.

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

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

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.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

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

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

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

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.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

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

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

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

Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?

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.

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

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.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

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

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

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

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