Chuck Palahniuk was born in Pasco, Washington on February 21, 1962. Palahniuk’s writing started when he was in his early 30’s. He could not publish his novel, Invisible Monsters. He wrote another novel, Fight Club when he was working as a diesel mechanic. This was a short story and later converted into a full novel. The novel had good reports and received awards as well. Palahniuk has several awards to his credit: Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award (1997), Oregon Book Award for Best Novel (1997), and Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award (2003). Five of his novels have been filmed. Chuck has not disclosed any information on his marital status and relationship. The Fight Club author’s words are brutally honest and too real. Checkout Chuck Palahniuk Quotes.
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
- Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… it’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.
- The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
- The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it’s 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.
- Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
- If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person
- The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.
- If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing ‘real’ was at risk, what would you do? You’d live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That’s what the ghosts want us to do – all the exciting things they no longer can.
- All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
- 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.
- You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake… This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.
- Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
- The first step to eternal life is you have to die.
- No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
- I used to work as a volunteer in a hospice, but I don’t have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything, so I was what they call an escort. I would take people to the support groups every night, and I would have to sit sort of on the sidelines so I could take them back to hospice at the end of the meeting.
- Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it’s the things you don’t do, and you get screwed.
- You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.
- There will always be an underground.
- What we don’t understand we can make mean anything.
- If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that’s much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.
- More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself.
- Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.
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- In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that’s a really classic form of humor.
- As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents’ dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you’re never really finished as a person
- If we all lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, life would be much simpler.
- People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.
- I know that I’m going to die and that you’re going to die. I can’t do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure.
- I’m always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.
- Jack Palance was my distant uncle – that’s the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous ‘heavy’ in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.
- Masochism is a valuable job skill.
- That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both way.
- If nothing else, there’s comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.
- If nothing else, there’s comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.
- Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
- My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation – often elevated loneliness – to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.
- I really love idiot, enlightened characters – these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.
- Personal identity seems like it’s just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’ to Jay Gatsby in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you’re given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?
- My grandfather was hit over the head by a crane boom in Seattle. Some of the family claimed he was never a violent, crazy person before that. Some say he was. It depends who you believe.
- My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
- Think about George Orwell’s three-minute hate from the novel ‘1984’ and how that left everyone sort of exhausted and able to live their boring humdrum lives. If our lives are going to continue being unfulfilled and boring, perhaps we do need some sort of short-term violent chaos incorporated into them, to make them more palatable.
- To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
- There’s a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.
- A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
- I get a lot of letters from women who insist that ‘Fight Club’ is not just a guy thing. They insist that women have the same rage and need the same outlet.
- The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.
- We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
- The best fights don’t occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.
- 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.
- Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.
- The answer is there is no answer.
- Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.
- I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.
- 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
- You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
- When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
- Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
- The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
- Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
- Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.
- If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.
- We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
- Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.
- I’ve got two dogs; they’re Boston terriers, and they’re allowed everywhere.
- The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can’t write a story where someone is a simple victim because it’s boring.
- I don’t do much more than organise other people’s ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.
- If you flee from the things you fear, there’s no resolution.
- Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.
- I just don’t want to die without a few scars.
- I love the power of words – no music or special effects – and I want to demonstrate that power.
- I am enormously uncool. I’ve made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I’m fine with that.
- Men want to make the best use of time and want to see how something can inform them and give them a stronger sense of power.
- I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.
- Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don’t want to waste my time with them.
- I think, in a way, I invented the term ‘fight club’ and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I’ve been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.
- Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
- You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
- With a book, you’re guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it’s one of the few advantages books still have.
- I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There’s such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it – Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Alexander McQueen, Heath Ledger.
- My books didn’t fit a marketing niche.
- The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.
- We’re making the same mistakes we made 1,000 years ago. So they must be the right ones. So relax.
- I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.
Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.
- Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.
- Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
- 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.
- There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they’ll read my books.
- I’m only confrontational with my friends.
- Any ‘artist’ makes a living by expressing what others can’t – because they’re unaware of their feelings, they’re too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood.
- If you take my stuff apart, you’ll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who’s probably my favourite writer.
- Discovering the ‘impossible’ ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.
- I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.
- Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.
- It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can’t shut them up.
- Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that’s usually how you end up crying?
- I don’t care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.
- Every woman is just a different kind of problem.
- 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.
- Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn’t know anything.
- I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.
- My private history in terms of people in my life who are dead is very easy to discuss. I don’t feel those people can be threatened or intruded upon now. But I am enormously protective of the people who are currently in my life, my existing friends and family. That is where the curtain is drawn.
People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.
- I think in a way, you’re doomed, once you can envision something. You’re sort of doomed to make it happen. I’ve found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that’s usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.
- 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.
- If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
- I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.
- You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting… you.
- Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don’t any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.
- I live by fallacy. ‘If I get enough nice Ikea furniture, I’ll be a grown-up.’ Then I catch myself. Or, ‘If I get off by myself, away from the stress of modern life, I’ll be OK.’ Then I catch myself.
- Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.
- 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.
- Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
- Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman’s right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to ‘Stepford Wives
- At the age of 31, I realized, ‘Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.’
People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.
- Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.
- When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don’t want to distract myself from anything.
- The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.
