Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida likens writing fiction to a software code that operates in the hardware of your mind. Stringing together separate macros that, combined, will create a reaction.

The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

There are lots of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Driving east, I'm not sure what we're running from. Evie or the police of Mr. Baxter or the Rhea sisters. Or nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up, getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if by running we won't have to get on with our lives.

That's what I tell peo­ple. My of­fi­cial ver­sion of the truth.

If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you.

Aim low and you won't be disappointed.

Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboros, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled. There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all? 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.

This is how we must look to God.

Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless.

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill

This should be my favorite part, being held and crying with Big Bob without hope. We all work so hard all the time. This is the only place I ever really relax and give up.

La historia no es más que una sucesión de monstruos o de víctimas. O de testigos.

please accept the fact that people do not change over time.The elderly are, in reality, age tikes.Conversely, the young are juvenile codgers.Granted, we might develop some skills, achieve some profound insights over a lifetime, but by and large who you are at eighty-five is who you were at five.One is either born intelligent or not.The body ages, grows, passes through near-lunatic phases of reproductive frenzy, but you are born and die the same person.

This is better than real life.

Every takeoff and landing, when the plane banked too much to one side, I prayed for a crash.

If you can change the way people think, she said.The way they see themselves.The way they see the world.If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives.And that's the only lasting thing you can create.

I don't want her falling in love with me as a voice on the phone while at the same time she's try­ing to ditch me as a re­al per­son.

How could you let me love something that was going to die?

Because after you've crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them.

I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest. The agent said that sounded pretty realistic.