Chuck Palahniuk
Every character sees the world through a framework of education and experience that they're proud experts about. To write a character, find out what they know best, and THEN you'll know how they'll describe a "hot day." Or a "pretty girl."Collection: Girl
I'm really glad that I spent my twenties messing around and having disaster after disaster - with people who were doing likewise - because it's really my greatest treasure now.Collection: Greatest Treasure
You don’t care where I live or how I feel, or what I eat or how I feed my kids or how I pay the doctor if I get sick, and yes I am stupid and bored and weak, but I am still your responsibility.Collection: Stupid
You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.Collection: Real
People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become.Collection: Years
Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.Collection: Giving Up
We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.Collection: Stars
This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.Collection: Book
When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.Collection: Space
No matter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.Collection: Fall
Control the things you can control. As for the rest - God bless it all.Collection: God Bless
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.Collection: Powerful
I suppose it’s comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.Collection: Self
Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?Collection: Night
Most people would never admit it, but they'd been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.Collection: Stupid
We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.Collection: Depression
You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.Collection: Thinking
you ever been trapped in a world where you're everyone's worst nightmare?Collection: Worst Nightmares
Don't rush or force the ending. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.Collection: Writing
Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.Collection: Sex
As the stupidest person in the room, I always had the most to gain.Collection: Stupidest
I think that young people are less attached to items and objects now. They're less attached to consuming things and accruing things because they see it as a system that doesn't necessarily work and give them a sense of adulthood and fulfillment. They're much more in tune with wanting to achieve a skill, a form of self-expression, or a body of knowledge that fulfills the same function, fulfills their adulthood.Collection: Thinking
I hate how on TV they have to fill so many minutes. It means they have to put in anything, and by doing so they sort of trivialize news; news becomes this commodity that they need to fill dead time between commercials with.Collection: Hate
If you make people laugh too much, their blood becomes - I believe it is acidic as opposed to alkaline. It changes the oxygen level in the blood, and people are likelier to pass out at that point.Collection: Believe
My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst.Collection: Risk
Somehow people have been sold on the idea that only professionals can entertain them, that only professionals can sing or tell jokes. And people are cut out of this creativity loop, and creativity is being limited to these large, centralized voices.Collection: Creativity
Some writers research in order to write. I write in order to research topics that interest me. Especially if I can meet with other people, in forums from illness support groups to phone-sex hotlines, and learn what other people know best.Collection: Sex
Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.Collection: Wise
To preserve yourself as the center of the world, to stay your own best authority on everything, your own expert on all topics, infallible, omniscient. Always, every time of the month, forever: Use birth control.Collection: Giving
I want my whole life lined with a topical anesthetic.Collection: Want
You could stab a knife right through my heart and you'd be too late.Collection: Heart
Daytime television, you can tell who’s watching by the three kinds of commercials. Either it’s clinics for drying out drunks. Or it’s law firms who want to settle injury suits. Or it’s schools offering mail-order vocational degrees to make you a bookkeeper. A private detective. Or a locksmith. If you’re watching daytime television, this is your new demographic. You’re a drunk. Or a cripple. Or an idiot.Collection: School
An important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward.Collection: Drama
And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.Collection: Fall
At the last minute, I couldn't wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on someone's front stoop.Collection: Mustache
Give me romance. Flash. Give me denial.Collection: Giving
What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?Collection: House
Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.Collection: Suicide
What kind of dining set defines me as a person?Collection: Dining
I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.Collection: Character
In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.Collection: Dark
That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed.Collection: Thinking
What you forget when you're planning a hijack by yourself is somewhere along the line, you might need to neglect your hostages just long enough so you can use the bathroom.Collection: Long
Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks.Collection: Death
Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them.Collection: Crazy
They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful. Because now she looks so—bad.Collection: Beautiful
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?Collection: God
About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I'm really angry, I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota.Collection: Office
In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.Collection: Husband