Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

383 Sourced Quotes

Her mom and dad are both doctors and want her to follow her dream, not turn out the way they have, no matter how much it costs them.

Chuck Palahniuk
New carpet will exude poisonous formaldehyde for up to two years after it'd been laid. I know the feeling.

Chuck Palahniuk
Yes, and I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism.

Chuck Palahniuk
Just each of us being me, me, me first. The murderer, the victim, the witness each of us thinks our role is the lead. Probably that goes for anybody in the world.

Chuck Palahniuk
It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.

Chuck Palahniuk
Kids, she says. When they're little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you're the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it's just the opposite. After that, you're either a liar or a fool or a villain.

Chuck Palahniuk
Skin, bones, blood and organs transplant from person to person. Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited. Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.

Chuck Palahniuk
Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand 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.

Chuck Palahniuk
The government says Rant's alive because they need a villain. The kids say he's alive because they need a hero.

Chuck Palahniuk
For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
Peter used to say that an artist's job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.

Chuck Palahniuk
If you haven't already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.
In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.

Chuck Palahniuk
Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It's like stealing something valuable they don't even know they own.

Chuck Palahniuk
Brandy is so attractive you could chop her head off and put it on blue velvet in the window at Tiffany's and somebody would buy it for a million dollars.

Chuck Palahniuk
Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
Anything pretty,' Claire will tell you, 'it's only for sale because no one wants it.

Chuck Palahniuk
Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

Chuck Palahniuk
In truth, the degree of anyone's success depends on how often they can say the word yes and hear the word no.

Chuck Palahniuk
I don't know the difference between what I want and what I'm trained to want.

Chuck Palahniuk
In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.

Chuck Palahniuk
People die', she says. 'People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything.' She says, 'Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture.

Chuck Palahniuk
All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
They should let some people into the library by prescription only

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

Chuck Palahniuk
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.

Chuck Palahniuk