Chuck Palahniuk
My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.
I write in a noisy, distracting world so the books can be read there.
Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.
When the 'Fight Club' movie was going into production, I quit my job so I could write full-time.
With a book, you're guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it's one of the few advantages books still have.
I know that I'm going to die and that you're going to die. I can't do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure.
At the age of 31, I realized, 'Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.'
Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.
Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.
There's a television show, 'Hoarders,' where people have those homes filled with stuff. Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.
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.
In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.
I dread the promotion part of my job. It's agony, especially compared to the private, at-home joy of writing. But being a grown-up means doing every part of the larger task.
I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.
If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever.
Arguing that God doesn't exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn't exist because they couldn't see them.
I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that.
People said that 'Fight Club' would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.
My writing process isn't a very organized thing.
Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.
I haven't had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case.
I think Chris Brown gets kind of dismissed as a gay writer, and I think Chris's books are really, really smart. I wish his books sold a little more widely.
Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.
So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies; they're lived through what we watch on television - they're not actual events in our life.
I've got two dogs; they're Boston terriers, and they're allowed everywhere.
The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.
I usually write in my kitchen, which is a large, octagonal room that looks into woods - three big windows look out into the trees.
While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.
My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.
I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.
A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.
My policy is to not read any reviews.
We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.
If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.
Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.
No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
I used to work as a volunteer in a hospice, but I don't have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything, so I was what they call an escort. I would take people to the support groups every night, and I would have to sit sort of on the sidelines so I could take them back to hospice at the end of the meeting.
If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.
We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for export to Israel. It took us years to get through.
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.
A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.