Quotes by Chuck Palahniuk
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I will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.

My goal is more to be remembered. They'll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.

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.

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

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.

I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.

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.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

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

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

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.

A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.

If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever.

I love the power of words -- no music or special effects -- and I want to demonstrate that power.

I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.

For me, writing is a kind of coping mechanism.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

I tell everyone I interact with what I'm working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.

My stories always have these twisted happy endings, and the boy always gets the girl.

My personal theory is that younger audiences disdain books -- not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter.

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.

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

Masochism is a valuable job skill.

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

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

We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.

To be honest, I hate silence.

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

It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can't shut them up.

If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.

In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.

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

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

A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.

My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for export to Israel. It took us years to get through.

The best fights don't occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.

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.'

People would ask me to autograph their bodies and then the next time I'd see them on tour they'd have my autograph tattooed. I decided I wouldn't write on people anymore, but I'd give them arms and legs and if they wanted those autographed I'd do that.

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

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

The first step to eternal life is you have to die.

Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.

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

The bright future is that readers are accepting more varied forms of stories.

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.

As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more?

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.

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.

While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.

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.

For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.

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

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.

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

Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion -- painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.

I think it's more important to write something that brings men back to reading than it is to write for people who already read. There's a reason men don't read, and it's because books don't serve men. It's time we produce books that serve men.

We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings.

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

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

I wouldn't get nearly as many books written if I lived in New York. The Columbia Gorge is fantastic. When the sun shines, I just want to be outdoors.

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

My books are all fantastically sentimental.

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