Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

I never think I'm making fun of my culture. In fact I'm making fun of myself, because I catch myself doing some very stupid things.

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

The best fights don't occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.

If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.

I thought 'Fight Club' was great as David Fincher's version.

In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.

A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.

If you tell folks you're a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you're talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn't work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.

His computer password is "password.

He was the kind of boy any young girl should date while she's still able to recover.

If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.

Every author has to eventually write a food book.

The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring.

Think about George Orwell's three-minute hate from the novel '1984' and how that left everyone sort of exhausted and able to live their boring humdrum lives. If our lives are going to continue being unfulfilled and boring, perhaps we do need some sort of short-term violent chaos incorporated into them, to make them more palatable.

My grandfather was hit over the head by a crane boom in Seattle. Some of the family claimed he was never a violent, crazy person before that. Some say he was. It depends who you believe.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.

Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies. It's no wonder Waltraud Wagner, the Austrian Angel of Death, convinced her friends to kill with her. It just seems natural. You and me against the world...

I've been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.

Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we're born?

Now this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue collar Nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven't already done.

Unless we have that moment of chaos, followed by the emotional release of realization, nothing will be remembered.

Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you're a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.