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. – Chuck Palahniuk
I wouldn’t get nearly as many books written if I lived in New York. The Columbia Gorge is fantastic. When the sun shines, I just want to be outdoors. – Chuck Palahniuk
Discovering the ‘impossible’ ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief. – Chuck Palahniuk
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. – Chuck Palahniuk
Of the big horror movies of the ’70s, you have ‘The Omen,’ ‘The Sentinel,’ ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘The Stepford Wives,’ ‘Burnt Offerings’ – these are all romantic fatalist movies where there’s a sort of glimmer of hope… but darkness wins. – Chuck Palahniuk
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. – Chuck Palahniuk
A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. – Chuck Palahniuk
Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we’ve got a story about absolutely everything. – Chuck Palahniuk
We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. – Chuck Palahniuk
If nothing else, there’s comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering. – Chuck Palahniuk
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. – Chuck Palahniuk
If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever. – Chuck Palahniuk
I’m always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity. – Chuck Palahniuk
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. – Chuck Palahniuk
We don’t see a lot of models for male social interaction. There’s sports and barn raisings. – Chuck Palahniuk
A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine. – Chuck Palahniuk
When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she’d read a dozen a month. – Chuck Palahniuk
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. – Chuck Palahniuk
People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens. – Chuck Palahniuk
Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them. – Chuck Palahniuk
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. – Chuck Palahniuk
