Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

Peter used to say, The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face. You're doomed to being you. This, he says, leaves su free to draw anything, since we're only drawing ourselves. Your handwriting. The way you walking. Which China pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a Diary.

Anonymity is the new fame.

You wake up, and that's enough.

It happens fast for some people and slow for other, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated

How is it that you keep mutating and can still be the same virus?

I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything... Nothing was ever good enough, my mom says, so here at the end of my life, I'm left with nothing.

In the way our world is, everybody shoulder to shoulder, people knowing everything about you at first glance, a good veil is your tinted limousine window. The unlisted number for your face. Behind a good veil, you could be anyone.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.

The mistakes we make in our youth, she said solemnly, we pay for with the rest of our lives.

To my mind, those who can, do. Those who can't, gripe.

The club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the centre of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.

When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

Kill your­self or don't kill your­self, but stop tor­tur­ing me. I'm try­ing to move on with my life.

The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.

Potassium cyanide, says the talent wrangler as she leans over to pick up a paper napkin off the floor. Found naturally in the cassava or manioc roots native to Africa, used to tint architectural blueprints in the form of the deep-blue pigment known as Prussian blue. Hence the shade 'cyan' blue.

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.

Because supposedly those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

People don't listen, they just wait for their turn to talk.

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death. This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick. Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.

It would be that time--late at night-- when your ears reach out for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open.

There's a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead.

You become smart when you don't need to quote someone anymore. I am still stupid: I quoted Chuck Palahiniuk