Quotes By Chuck Palahniuk

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 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?

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

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

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.

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

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

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.

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

You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.

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

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

I'm only confrontational with my friends.