Top 1089 Quotes & Sayings by Chuck Palahniuk - Page 3

My publisher's been shipping me to comic-cons, and it seems that my readership overlaps perfectly with the comic-con crowd.

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.

We kind of deny the stages of life.

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.

Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.

I believe in something. But I don't believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.

At school I was lazy. But I started working when I was 15, washing dishes at a local truck stop restaurant. I was really, really bored with school, and I wanted to get a job as fast as I could. School was just so easy. There was just no challenge to it.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.

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

Once I start writing, I can't stop.

The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.

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

My parents used to fight a lot, and I think they fought a lot at night, and they would turn the television up to hide the sound of their fighting.

I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won't have a career.'

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.

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.

Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.

I never think I'm making fun of my culture. In fact I'm making fun of myself, because I catch myself doing some very stupid things.

I try to forget about the expectation that's out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I'm not trying to please them. I've spent a huge amount of time not communicating with those folks and denying that they exist.

I always thought I'd write when I retired - when I turned 65.

For me, writing is a kind of coping mechanism.

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.

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.

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.

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

I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

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.

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

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.

Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.

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.

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

I will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.

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.

My way of being with people is probably incredibly unhealthy, in that I'll be incredibly social, and I won't write a word for maybe a year, and I'll just be with people, going to parties and soaking up stories, and just sort of recharging all of my ideas.

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.

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.

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

Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it's not the king any more.

To be honest, I hate silence.

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

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.

I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it's good to add more emotion and chaos.

One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they're able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they decided.

People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens.

My books are all fantastically sentimental.

People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.

The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.

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.

My goal is never to make fun of religion.

I write nothing but contemporary romances.

When I first used to tour, guys would come up and say, 'Where's the fight club in my area?' and I would say, 'There isn't one.' And they'd say, 'No, no, you can tell me, you can tell me.'

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.

I don't know if you ever really feel like you've made it.

Writing gave me the world.

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

I thought 'Fight Club' was great as David Fincher's version.