Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday.

By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.

Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.

A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?""Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it ...

The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED ...

Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on th...

Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. I...

The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinera...

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. Every time you d...

You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in the...

Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it.How this feels is I'm...

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns ...

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make th...

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distrac...

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

My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I'm not what...

His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.

It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw...

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated co...

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstru...

We just had a near-life experience!

Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to s...

Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything ...

My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers ...

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing...

I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it h...

Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the pe...

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

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility t...

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

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

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

Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.

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

Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.

With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.

It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that yo...

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

Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight. Give me violent revenge fant...

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their...

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

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

First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a...

When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don't want to distract myself f...

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The ...

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...

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

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we c...

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scare...

What is the real purpose behind the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? They seem like gr...

What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.

Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active...

The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watc...

You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you...

A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainm...

That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to...

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

The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.

Of the big horror movies of the '70s, you have 'The Omen,' 'The Sentinel,' 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'The S...

Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices so...

In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then peop...

It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your...

I'm always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconven...

When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away...

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the f...

My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are...

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

I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.

Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

With a book, you're guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to m...

If this is death, if we are dead or dying or even if we are living and just going to die, then what ...

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

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

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

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

My mom says, "Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?"Jump to how much I hate my brot...

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

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

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have ...

The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run f...

We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forg...

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a...

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

Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.

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

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

I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this...

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

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...

Make me into anything, but just love me.

Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of yo...

I still love him so much I'll hide any amount of conjugated estrogen in his food. So much I'll do an...

Could you hold the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth, please?

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.

Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up ...

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