Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.

We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.

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

We went sailing one time, and he wore a Speedo, and any smart woman should know that means bisexual at least.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we don't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.

... the first step to eternal live is you have to die.

My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way.

You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.

The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.

My parents used to fight a lot, and I think they fought a lot at night, and they would turn the television up to hide the sound of their fighting.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.

That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.

When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level.

To be honest, I hate silence.

The only biodiversity we're going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi. We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.

Also consider that someday, when you're dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.

Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.

Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?