Top 100 Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
#1. People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser.
Chuck Palahniuk
#3. Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.
Chuck Palahniuk
#4. 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.
Chuck Palahniuk
#5. 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
#7. This is all my identification, my birth certificate, my everything. You can be Shannon McFarland from now on. My career. The ninety-degree attention. It's yours. All of it. Everything. I hope it's enough for you. It's everything I have left.
Chuck Palahniuk
#9. Also consider that someday, when you're dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.
Chuck Palahniuk
#11. Maybe this is why Misty loved him. Loved you. Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself.
Chuck Palahniuk
#12. She'd wear shades of lipstick you'd expect to see around the base of a penis.
Chuck Palahniuk
#13. How is it that you keep mutating and can still be the same virus?
Chuck Palahniuk
#14. 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.
Chuck Palahniuk
#15. We all have this moment, when your folks first see you as someone not growing up to be them.
Chuck Palahniuk
#18. We were all runing from something. Vaginoplasty. Aging. The future.
Chuck Palahniuk
#19. Give me clarity. Give me reasons. Give me answers.
Flash.
Chuck Palahniuk
#20. When someone walks in and you say "a six-foot-tall man," you miss the opportunity to describe what a six-foot-tall man would look like to your narrator, because how the narrator describes a six-foot-tall man says more about the narrator than about the man.
Chuck Palahniuk
#21. I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.
Chuck Palahniuk
#23. I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.
Chuck Palahniuk
#25. I want you to know I won't always be here,' Fertility says, 'but I'll always find you.
Chuck Palahniuk
#26. There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.
Chuck Palahniuk
#27. You become smart when you don't need to quote someone anymore.
I am still stupid: I quoted Chuck Palahiniuk
Chuck Palahniuk
#31. But my mom's going to hate being hated. she's a skinny beautiful lady with perfect hair; she's just not equipped to deal with hate.
Chuck Palahniuk
#32. We don't live in the real world anymore. We live in a world of symbols.
Chuck Palahniuk
#33. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.
Chuck Palahniuk
#34. I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo."
"Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?
Chuck Palahniuk
#35. 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.
Chuck Palahniuk
#36. My goldfish is swimming around all excited inside the fishbowl on the fridge so I reach up and drop a Valium in its water.
Chuck Palahniuk
#37. A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.
Chuck Palahniuk
#38. The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill
Chuck Palahniuk
#39. If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?'
Clawing at the roof of her coffin.
Chuck Palahniuk
#40. Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.
Chuck Palahniuk
#41. 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.
Chuck Palahniuk
#42. The third person allows characters to really attack themselves. We all do this - attack ourselves - every hour of our lives.
Chuck Palahniuk
#43. Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass."
Like somehow we're running out of time.
Chuck Palahniuk
#44. Jump to one time, late one night, driving between Nowhere, Wyoming, and WhoKnowsWhere, Montana, when Seth says how your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. "Then puberty makes you Satan," he says, "just because you want something better." J
Chuck Palahniuk
#45. If I did have a tumor, I would name it Marla. Marla, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can't.
Chuck Palahniuk
#46. It's eerie, but what's happening is the folks are staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor, on and on, completely trapped in a reality loop that never ends.
Chuck Palahniuk
#47. Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you'd been reading.
Chuck Palahniuk
#48. Watching hours of television seemed to help, but it took brainpower to be so dumb.
Chuck Palahniuk
#49. My books are more about people experimenting with different identities and social models in a short-term way before they can break through to something authentic.
Chuck Palahniuk
#50. For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.
Chuck Palahniuk
#51. How folks lay claim to a loved one is they give you a name of their own. They figure to label you as their property.
Chuck Palahniuk
#52. First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.
Chuck Palahniuk
#53. If you ask me, reincarnation is just another way to procrastinate.
Chuck Palahniuk
#54. You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.
Chuck Palahniuk
#55. The supreme manifestation of all his self-perceived shortcomings
Chuck Palahniuk
#56. 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
#58. Amber saw getting infected as the ultimate commitment. Like her and the guy would be doomed to be with each other. Looking back, she figured a brush with death would make her really enjoy her life. Like she would feel more alive.
Chuck Palahniuk
#59. You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs, fuck you
Chuck Palahniuk
#60. And it [Fight Club novel] was written so general that my father thought I was writing about his father, and my boss thought I was writing about his boss. People really put themselves, you know, in the shoes of the narrator.
Chuck Palahniuk
#61. All these thousands of miles later, all these different people I've been, and it's still the same story. Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying? How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?
Chuck Palahniuk
#62. You take a 98-percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid. Do this in an ice bath. Then add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper. You have nitroglycerin.
Chuck Palahniuk
#63. What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to bw wrong?
Chuck Palahniuk
#64. You ever wonder if Adam and Eve were just the puppies God dumped because they wouldn't house-train?
Chuck Palahniuk
#65. The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.
Chuck Palahniuk
#66. Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.
Chuck Palahniuk
#67. You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buy s a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble.
Chuck Palahniuk
#68. Portland is quickly becoming one of those lovely, lush Third World countries where kinda-rich people retire with their money.
Chuck Palahniuk
#69. You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you're changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you'll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you'll be dead.
Chuck Palahniuk
#70. Why should I believe any of this?'
It happens that fast.
I say, because I think I like you.
Marla says, 'Not love?'
This is a cheesy enough moment, I say. Don't push it.
Chuck Palahniuk
#71. 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
#72. You ever wonder when god's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?
Chuck Palahniuk
#73. 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
#74. I tell everybody, I'm tired of being jerked around. Okay? So let's just not pretend. I don't have fuck for a heart. You people are not going to make me feel anything. You are not going to get to me.
Chuck Palahniuk
#75. Control the things you can control. As for the rest - God bless it all.
Chuck Palahniuk
#76. Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.
Flash.
Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!
Flash.
Chuck Palahniuk
#77. To my mind, those who can, do. Those who can't, gripe.
Chuck Palahniuk
#78. All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.
Chuck Palahniuk
#79. You're a product just as much. a product of a product. the people who design cars, they're products, your teachers, products. the minister in your church, another product.
Chuck Palahniuk
#80. Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.
Chuck Palahniuk
#81. Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight. Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.
Chuck Palahniuk
#82. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or art director says.
Like Tyler says, even a souffle looks pumped.
Chuck Palahniuk
#83. The problem with proximity friends is, they move away. They quit or get fired.
Chuck Palahniuk
#84. Good news didn't seem real until you'd told at least a dozen friends.
Chuck Palahniuk
#85. The story is even Bill Wilson, a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, couldn't overcome the sex monkey on his back, and spent his sober life cheating on his wife and filled with guilt.
Chuck Palahniuk
#86. A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.
Chuck Palahniuk
#88. If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.
Chuck Palahniuk
#89. When you look for these support groups, they all have vague upbeat names. My Thursday evening group for blood parasites, it's called Free and Clear.
Chuck Palahniuk
#90. The crap and the trash of the world. Post-consumer human butt wipe that no one would ever go to the trouble to recycle.
Chuck Palahniuk
#91. If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.
Chuck Palahniuk
#92. My father used to call me 'bird bones' and, well, the name fits.
Chuck Palahniuk
#93. Nobody used to look at George Washington, with his wooden teeth, in his powdered wig, and say, Fashion Victim.
Chuck Palahniuk
#96. I say, no. You've used me enough.
"If you don't cooperate, we'll go after Marla."
I say, lead the way.
Chuck Palahniuk
#97. 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
#98. Heads together. I tell the waiter, give us clean food, please. Please, don't be doing any trash to the stuff we order. In that case, sir,
Chuck Palahniuk
#99. If I grew old without having big regrets, I'd regret my caution.
Chuck Palahniuk
#100. The first step is to admit you're powerless. You have an addiction, and you can't stop. The first step is to tell your story, all the worst parts. Your lowest lows.
Chuck Palahniuk
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