Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won't have a career.'

Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.

When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don't want to distract myself from anything.

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.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.

My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.

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.

You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you.

Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.

My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.

I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that.

So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies; they're lived through what we watch on television - they're not actual events in our life.

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

College is like a fountain of knowledge - and the students are there to drink

Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation... they're inseparable.

I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.

People said that 'Fight Club' would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.

Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.

I dread the promotion part of my job. It's agony, especially compared to the private, at-home joy of writing. But being a grown-up means doing every part of the larger task.

If we all lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, life would be much simpler.