Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

If she was going to die, Marla didn't want to know about it.

And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.

I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off.

I don't want to die without any scars.

But if you tell folks you're a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you're talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn't work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.

Anymore, no one's mind is their own.

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

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

What if reality is nothing but some disease?

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.

I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.

It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.

They'd told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent

How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who seek to bring them to justice. It’s no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited detectives with his - or her - coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired.

You’ve thrown down the gauntlet. You’ve brought my wrath down upon your house. Now, to prove that I exist I must kill you. As the child outlives the father, so must the character bury the author. If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living.But… If I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still exist… then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master.

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. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of theaudience.

Suicide is very contagious.

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.

Sex pretty much cures everything.

I was very invested in love but it was just this long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's about getting off.

The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.

If you're male, and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career.

You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

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 his death from being a total surprise.

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

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 up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master, and nobody had noticed. Still, i'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When i pass people in the hall at work, I get toally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.

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.

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

Advertising has these people chassing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need. We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

There are worse things you can do to people you love than kill them.

It's exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.

As human beings, our first commandment is:Something needs to happen

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?

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

They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment.

You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.

We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. it's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There's just decisions and disease and death.

your handwriting. the way you walk. 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.

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.

You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

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.

Make me into anything, but just love me.

Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.

He was the kind of boy any young girl should date while she's still able to recover.

The amazing miracle of death, when one second you're walking and talking, and the next second you're an object.

If this is death, if we are dead or dying or even if we are living and just going to die, then what do we have to fear? What are we worried about? I think the knowledge of death is freeing. That pressure we feel, the weight of life and its impending conclusion, is imaginary. And the fact that we’re all in this together is unifying: there’s solidarity in mortality.

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

Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby.

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.