Chuck Palahniuk Quotations

Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk (born 1962-02-21) is an American satirical novelist and freelance journalist.

Sourced

I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying "We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything." And I'm like, "Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that’s all I did."
- On the creation of Fight Club
- Interview with Rolling Stone (2002-09-19)

I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.
- Interview with the San Francisco Bay Guardian (2002-10-30)

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.
- Salon.com Letters. Response by Palahniuk to Laura Miller's review. (2003-08-26)

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.
- Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (2004)

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.”
- Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (2004)

All my friends with PalmPilots and cell phones, they’re always calling themselves and leaving reminders to themselves about what’s about to happen. We leave Post-it notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they engrave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record a message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there’s those digital cameras, so we can all email around our photos — this century’s equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive.
- Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (2004)

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.
- Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (2004)

Why have I sold out? You think I'm supposed to grow old, beating some trite old protest drum that people don't hear anymore? Please; protest is now just a backdrop for a Diesel clothing ad in a slick fashion magazine. My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way. It's time — for me, at least — to be clever and seduce people by entertaining them. I'll never be heard if I'm always ranting and griping.
- "You Ask The Questions," The Independent Review (2004-03-25)

How sweet! You still believe in death... that's just so... quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me.
- "You Ask The Questions," The Independent Review (2004-03-25)

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.
- Closing remarks made on an eClass forum (Barnes & Noble University) (2004-12-05)

I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion’s leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night – as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here’s Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public.
- Quoted in Andrew Lawless, "Those burnt tongue moments - Chuck Palahniuk in interview", Three Monkeys (May 2005)

All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss.
- On what sets him apart from others in his genre.
- Online chat transcript, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (2007-05-01)

Going to spring break at Ft. Lauderdale, getting drunk and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of a patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to know she is even in distress.
- Snuff (2008)