Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

» A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

» All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

» Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

» Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

» Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

» Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.

» Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

» I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some bline, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total suprise.

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

» I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.

» I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

» If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

» It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.

» Masochism is a valuable job skill.

» More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

» My father always said, Get married before the sex gets boring or you'll never get married.

» No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

» Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

» People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

» People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

» Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

» Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

» The answer is there is no answer.

» The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

» The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

» What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

» When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

» Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?

» You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

» You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you. All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog. People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden. People need somebody they can send a check at Christmas. So stay poor. Charity isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

» You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

» The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate.

» The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. stone crumbles. wood rots. people, well, they die. but things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

» If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?

» Your heart is my pinata.

» Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

» People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

» It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and legs everybody has. We're so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to want.

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

» We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

» What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

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

» Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

» We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

» If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

» You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

» I just don't want to die without a few scars.

» Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

» I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's just about getting off. Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.

» If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't

» You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger.

» I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure. A spinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined.

» You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

» I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total surprise.

» Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality

» Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education

» What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we cant decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables. There is only the inevitable.

» Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.

» People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

» Which is worse: Hell or nothing?

» Someone bent on suicide won't have much sense of humor left.

» Being tired isn't the same as being rich, but most times it's close enough.

» If you could be God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

» It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

» On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

» When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.

» Hysteria is only possible with an audience.

» It's not living alone if you keep a rifle under the bed.

» People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

» The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.

» The most boring thing in the entire world is nudity. The second most boring thing is honesty.

» The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

» The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

» When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if she'd ever just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.

» When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

» When you understand that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

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

» You know that saying about how you always kill the one you love? It works both ways.

» Beauty is power like money is power like a gun is power.

» Today is the kind of day where the sun only comes up to humilate you.

» Reality means you live until you die...the real truth is nobody wants reality

» The only difference between martyrdom and suicide really is press coverage.

» It's only in drugs or death that we experience anything new and death is just too controling.

» What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized yet.

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

» The only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

» Right now, me getting killed would be redundant.

» The cultures that don't castrate you to make you a slave, they castrate your mind. They make sex so filthy and evil and dangerous that no matter how good you know it would feel to have sexual relations, you won't.

» The joke is, we all have the same punch line.

» Art never comes from happiness.

» Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.

» Maybe we don't go to hell for the things we do, maybe we go to hell for the things we don't do.

» We are all haunted and haunting.

» The only biodeversity we're going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi.

» After long enough, everyone in the world will become your enemy.

» Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

» A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

» Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn't bother to torture you if she didn't.

» We have no scar to show from happiness. We learn so little from peace.

» If you don't work, you don't sleep. Day and night, you're half awake, bored.

» You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.

» If you love something set it free...but don't be surprised when it comes back with herpes.

» This is just what human beings do--turn objects into people, people into objects.

» If death meant leaving the stage long enough just to change costumes and become a new character, would you speed up? Or slow down?

» That's the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

» Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.

» Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you reenlist.

» Anytime 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.