Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

383 Sourced Quotes

The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing and so she won't commit to anything.

Chuck Palahniuk
Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection.

Chuck Palahniuk
If you're male and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?

Chuck Palahniuk
You can't be beautiful," Brandy says about a thousand times, "until you feel beautiful.

Chuck Palahniuk
The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.

Chuck Palahniuk
The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it.
What's funny is, you'd be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world.
It's hard to call any of my novels fiction.

Chuck Palahniuk
If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
The weather today is partly angry, leading to resignation and ultimatums.

Chuck Palahniuk
At That Moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay. It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

Chuck Palahniuk
Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise.

Chuck Palahniuk
When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

Chuck Palahniuk
Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.

Chuck Palahniuk
And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody. The kid never knew the man's name. But he never forgot that smile. "Hero" isn't the first word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Chuck Palahniuk
What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.

Chuck Palahniuk
How I feel is cheap and used, dirty and humiliated. Dirty and tricked and thrown away.

Chuck Palahniuk
Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.

Chuck Palahniuk
I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything.

Chuck Palahniuk
So if reality is all a spell, and you don't really want what you think you want... If you have no free will. You don't really know what you know. You don't really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?

Chuck Palahniuk
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

Chuck Palahniuk
Also consider that someday, when you're dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.

Chuck Palahniuk
Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.

Chuck Palahniuk
The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don't die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.

Chuck Palahniuk
We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.

Chuck Palahniuk
You could stab a knife right through my heart and you'd be too late.

Chuck Palahniuk
Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

Chuck Palahniuk
When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if they'd even just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.

Chuck Palahniuk
A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy for a role you're planning to leave. You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret you want future critics to say you played the character better.

Chuck Palahniuk
No, none of us seem so very real. We're only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.

Chuck Palahniuk