Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.

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

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.

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

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

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

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?

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.

The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club…. The second rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

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

No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.

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

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.

For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

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.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.

The unreal is more powerful than the real.... Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

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

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.

By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.

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.