Chuck Palahniuk
What is the real purpose behind the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? They seem like greater steps toward faith and imagination, each with a payoff. Like cognitive training exercises.Collection: Easter
Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous 'heavy' in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.Collection: Family
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?Collection: Future
If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.Collection: Death
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?Collection: Happiness
Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.Collection: Pet
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.Collection: Alone
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.Collection: Great
My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Movies
If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?Collection: Death
Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.Collection: Change
If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can.Collection: Chance
When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don't want to distract myself from anything.Collection: Diet
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.Collection: Romantic
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.Collection: Freedom
I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.Collection: Relationship
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.Collection: Happiness
Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.Collection: Fear
We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.Collection: Sympathy
I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.Collection: Home
My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.Collection: Alone
In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor.Collection: Humor
Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking.
So much of 'Fight Club' was a rant against fathers.
For me, writing is a kind of coping mechanism.
I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.
The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense.
You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting... you.
The third person allows characters to really attack themselves. We all do this - attack ourselves - every hour of our lives.
Your life isn't about doing one perfect 'thing' and then falling down dead. It's more like going to church or writing a book. You do it over and over, always trying to be a little bit better. Then you die.
Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It's kind of like trick-or-treating.
My private history in terms of people in my life who are dead is very easy to discuss. I don't feel those people can be threatened or intruded upon now. But I am enormously protective of the people who are currently in my life, my existing friends and family. That is where the curtain is drawn.
My books didn't fit a marketing niche.
I don't think 'Guts' could get financed as a movie.
The young men, they look to me for a story they can get nowhere else, a challenging risky story.
Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.
Why do the lives of writers seem so... train-wrecky?
I'm trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.
Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation... they're inseparable.
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.
'Romance' is based on my entire creative process. I fall in love with an idea, obsess over it, isolate myself with it, and when I eventually introduce it to my friends, they all tell me that it's stupid.
Anytime my work can coax bodily fluids out of someone, I'm happy.
I think that I am responsible for the death of thousands of things and for the misery of thousands of people, just through the things that I buy and how I live my life, and these are not things that ever deserved to die.
I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.
I think it's more important to write something that brings men back to reading than it is to write for people who already read. There's a reason men don't read, and it's because books don't serve men. It's time we produce books that serve men.
Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.
In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.
I love the power of words - no music or special effects - and I want to demonstrate that power.
As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents' dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you're never really finished as a person.