Top 100 Palahniuk Quotes
#1. Leah never seemed to like the fact that I read Palahniuk. She called him sexist. I called her stupid.
Jayme K.
#2. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO
Chuck Palahniuk
#3. From a May 2010 Interview, Chuck Palahniuk
Weird and creepy but true, I've been reading lots of Judy Blume. Being a 48-year-old male reading about adolescent sex in Forever gets me lots of stares in airports ... At this point I am an authority on menstruation.
Chuck Palahniuk
#4. I guess my most prized pop culture possession is a signed first edition of the book 'Fight Club' by Chuck Palahniuk.
Jen Lancaster
#5. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. - Oscar Wilde (Chuck Palahniuk - Pygmy)
Oscar Wilde
#6. For example, if she joined the book club - there was always a book club - and hung out with them, her choice of guys would be limited to the dark and moody Chuck Palahniuk/Kurt Vonnegut/Life-Sucks-and-Then-You-Die brooders.
Pete Hautman
#7. The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people. -Benito Mussolini (Chuck Palahniuk - Pygmy)
Benito Mussolini
#8. Chuck Palahniuk asked which is worse: Hell or nothing. Here is my answer: Of course nothing! Because even in Hell, there is hope!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#9. The solution to this paradox (according to Palahniuk) is the theory of splintered alternative realities, where all possible trajectories happen autonomously and simultaneously (sort of how Richard Linklater describes The Wizard of Oz to an uninterested cab driver in the opening sequence of Slacker).
Chuck Klosterman
#10. Get your butt in a chair and write. If it comes out weak or bad or clunky or ordinary, then accept that this happens to everyone. Everyone. Get it down, get it done, and fix it in the rewrite. Just like everyone from Stephen King to J. K. Rowling to Chuck Palahniuk does.
Jonathan Maberry
#11. People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser.
Chuck Palahniuk
#12. The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
Chuck Palahniuk
#13. I love and adore all of my family, except when I'm with them.
Chuck Palahniuk
#14. The evil queen was stupid to play Snow White's game. There's an age where a woman has to move on to another kind of power. Money, for example. Or a gun.
Chuck Palahniuk
#15. Peter used to say that an artist's job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.
Chuck Palahniuk
#18. It's amazing what a woman will read into it if you by accident say, I love you. Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.
Chuck Palahniuk
#19. 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
#21. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased prince charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life.
Chuck Palahniuk
#22. I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.
Chuck Palahniuk
#23. There is no human soul, and I am absolutely for sure seriously not going to fucking cry.
Chuck Palahniuk
#24. Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat, it's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go. Let go
Chuck Palahniuk
#25. If you're ever in a big hotel lobby, and they start to play "The Blue Danube Waltz," get the hell out. Don't think. Run.
Chuck Palahniuk
#26. When I see people talking on the internet about me or my work it's almost always more a description of themselves and so I never really think of myself as anything more than just who I always was.
Chuck Palahniuk
#29. The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic ... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.
Chuck Palahniuk
#30. The nouvelle cuisine of anarchy. Barium nitrate in a sauce of sulfur and garnished with charcoal. That's your basic gunpowder. Bon appetit.
Chuck Palahniuk
#31. The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
Chuck Palahniuk
#32. 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.
Chuck Palahniuk
#33. In the sky overhead, it's the same sun watching us make the same mistakes over and over. It's the same blue sky..
Chuck Palahniuk
#34. If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.
Chuck Palahniuk
#36. Give me attention.
Flash.
Give me adoration.
Flash.
Give me a break.
Flash
Chuck Palahniuk
#37. Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
Chuck Palahniuk
#38. This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea that I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.
Chuck Palahniuk
#39. Precious souls as young as three or four, raised on the misplaced multicultural priorities of Sesame Street," he claims, "are doomed before they even enter the godless morass of the public school system.
Chuck Palahniuk
#40. You spend your entire life becoming God and then you die.
Chuck Palahniuk
#41. That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
Chuck Palahniuk
#42. How she looks is watered-down.
How she looks is disappearing.
How she looks is erased.
"Don't stress", she says. "This is just me not wearing any makeup.
Chuck Palahniuk
#43. The government says Rant's alive because they need a villain. The kids say he's alive because they need a hero.
Chuck Palahniuk
#44. Ultimately, everyone is acting out of what they feel is the best choice. In a way, they're all trying to improve the world. And I think that those basic choices make the world a better place.
Chuck Palahniuk
#45. I love the power of words - no music or special effects - and I want to demonstrate that power.
Chuck Palahniuk
#46. This would be ... a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.
Chuck Palahniuk
#47. The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don't die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.
Chuck Palahniuk
#48. 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.
Chuck Palahniuk
#49. I asked Tyler what he'd been fighting.
Tyler said, his father.
Maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves.
Chuck Palahniuk
#50. Every family has its scriptures, but most can't articulate them
Chuck Palahniuk
#51. Not everything is about money. You didn't even say, hello. You are not your sad little wallet.
Chuck Palahniuk
#52. At home, you'll sometimes wake up in your dark bed with the terror you've fallen asleep in the booth and missed a changeover.
Chuck Palahniuk
#56. Every direction I could see to go was just a different nightmare.
Chuck Palahniuk
#57. 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
#58. A blush only reminds me how blood is just under the surface of everything.
Chuck Palahniuk
#59. Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie.
Chuck Palahniuk
#61. We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings.
Chuck Palahniuk
#63. So if you think this is going to save you ... If you think anything is going to save you ... Please consider this your final warning.
Chuck Palahniuk
#65. Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.
Chuck Palahniuk
#66. Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be.
Chuck Palahniuk
#67. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.
Chuck Palahniuk
#68. Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.
Chuck Palahniuk
#69. 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.
Chuck Palahniuk
#70. I was eleven years old with menarche barreling down on me like a speeding bloodmobile.
Chuck Palahniuk
#71. I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful.
Chuck Palahniuk
#72. Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.
Chuck Palahniuk
#73. You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.
Chuck Palahniuk
#74. Her voice makes me think of her mouth makes me think of her breath makes me think of her breasts.
Chuck Palahniuk
#75. If you asked my dad about selecting any kind of professional career, he'd tell you, "Don't make a date with a heart attack." Meaning: You've got to pace yourself and not forget to slow down. No job is forever. So relax and have some fun.
Chuck Palahniuk
#76. I'm really glad that I spent my twenties messing around and having disaster after disaster - with people who were doing likewise - because it's really my greatest treasure now.
Chuck Palahniuk
#77. College is like a fountain of knowledge - and the students are there to drink
Chuck Palahniuk
#78. The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
Chuck Palahniuk
#79. Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.
Chuck Palahniuk
#81. Marla doesn't have testicular cancer. Marla doesn't have tuberculosis. She isn't dying. Okay in that brain brain-food philosophy way, we're all dying, but Marla isn't dying the way Chloe was dying.
Chuck Palahniuk
#82. 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
#83. Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection.
Chuck Palahniuk
#84. I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived ... and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables.
Chuck Palahniuk
#85. Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer ... or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded
the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]
Chuck Palahniuk
#88. The girl in 8G has no faith in herself," Marla shouts, "and she's worried that as she grows older, she'll have fewer and fewer options.
Chuck Palahniuk
#89. Plato said: 'He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.'
Chuck Palahniuk
#90. I am helpless.
I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things.
My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it "Entourage."
This is how bad your life can get.
Chuck Palahniuk
#91. As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.
Chuck Palahniuk
#92. Ah, Houellebecq. I've only read him in English translations so I'm sure I'm not getting the full greatness of his work, but golly, he writes better sex scenes than anyone else alive.
Chuck Palahniuk
#93. Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.
Chuck Palahniuk
#94. Give me needy emotional whining bullshit.
Flash.
Give me self-absorbed egocentric twaddle.
Christ.
Chuck Palahniuk
#95. One day the wickedness of the kings of the world would destroy us, oh sorrow, and armies of the world would march upon us, wailing, and the purest of the children of God would have to deliver themselves unto the Lord by their own hand.
The Deliverance.
Chuck Palahniuk
#96. So here I am. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave it.
Chuck Palahniuk
#97. What you forget when you're planning a hijack by yourself is somewhere along the line, you might need to neglect your hostages just long enough so you can use the bathroom.
Chuck Palahniuk
#98. It helps to know you're not any more responsible for how you look than a car is. You're a product just as much. A product of a product of a product.
Chuck Palahniuk
#99. A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.
Chuck Palahniuk
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