Chuck Palahniuk
There's an old saying: 'No piece of writing is ever finished, it's just abandoned.' But my own rule is: No piece of work is done until you want to kill everyone involved in the publishing process, especially yourself.Collection: Writing
And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.Collection: Fighting
Some mythological fat asswipe drives our national economy.Collection: Economy
Part of her doing suicide intervention is my caseworker has to mix me another gin and tonic.Collection: Suicide
Anymore, no one's mind is their own.Collection: Mind
Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass." Like somehow we're running out of time.Collection: Running
We're the culture that cried wolf.Collection: Culture
Hey, you created me! I didn't create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!Collection: Responsibility
You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it.Collection: Culture
Also consider that someday, when you’re dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.Collection: Baby
This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.Collection: Museums
The body ages. grows. passes through near-lunatic phases of reproductive frenzy, but you are born and die essentially the same person. That... that is proof of your deathless soul.Collection: Soul
I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.Collection: Believe In Yourself
It's just the biggest mistake I could think to makeCollection: Mistake
Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.Collection: Hurt
A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything- tangible or intangible- again. To never trust or wonder.Collection: Children
I want to have your abortion.Collection: Abortion
Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.Collection: Angel
This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window. You had their full attention. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. And when they spoke, they weren't just telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.Collection: Song
Your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. Then puberty makes you Satan, just because you want something better.Collection: Want Something
My life has been about living like a monk and looking like a priest so that people will come up to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and it might as well be me.Collection: People
I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.Collection: Book
A comedy ends with a wedding, and a tragedy ends with a funeral: you always have to juxtapose sex and death.Collection: Sex
I think standardization is really the first step to something being commodified.Collection: Thinking
Public taste changes and the aesthetic of a culture changes over time, so the idea isn't to appeal to the aesthetic of the moment and what people will like right now; the idea is to somehow keep yourself in the public memory so that as taste evolves it will eventually come to embrace your thing. So, it's about writing to be remembered rather than writing to be liked.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Fun
For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.Collection: Giving Up
The things you used to own, now they own you.Collection: Fight Club Book
The ultimate joke was the idea that capitalism would eat its own feces in order to make money, that would make fun of itself if capitalism thought there was a buck in it.Collection: Fun
Cults make people sing so hard for so long - because it over-oxygenates the blood and sets them up to faint.Collection: Blood
A certain number of people have to live their lives outdoors between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., and a certain number of people can only leave their homes between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. So basically, public life has to be lived in these shifts, in order for everyone to fit on the streets because there's just no more room for any more infrastructure, any more highways. So it polarizes the community into day people and night people, and it becomes sort of a metaphor for racism and classism.Collection: Home
Everyone is equal and everyone is forced to participate; you can't just be a spectator.Collection: Equal
For the most part my friends can always be more entertaining than the tube ever can be.Collection: Entertaining
I think we're in an age starved for genuine experiences, instead of cathartic phony experiences through the media, structured, engineered experiences. And those are the fast food, the masturbation of experience. They don't really exhaust any aspect of ourselves; they don't make us any stronger.Collection: Thinking
Real writers write because they love to write. They don't write for public acclaim.Collection: Real
Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain.Collection: Mother
And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.Collection: Real
There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.Collection: Real
When someone walks in and you say "a six-foot-tall man," you miss the opportunity to describe what a six-foot-tall man would look like to your narrator, because how the narrator describes a six-foot-tall man says more about the narrator than about the man.Collection: Opportunity
The money is in television. Books are not the dominant medium of our time, so fewer people will create them. In a sad way, books have become a form of "comfort food" we expect to lull us to sleep.Collection: Book
I write because it's a way of presenting something without having to be there.Collection: Writing
I am a writer and the greatest compliment I can get is to know that I've contributed language to the culture, that I've defined something, given it a name. So I think that is one of the great things a writer can do.Collection: Thinking
Everybody's still miserable in the same way they've always been miserable, and more and more of my friends - especially my male friends - find themselves taking anti-anxiety, psychotropic drugs. It seems like everybody I know is wondering if they're really who they are, or once the prescription runs out, will they become someone different?Collection: Running
You can't base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.Collection: Past
You're not getting this back you know. Consider it an asshole tax.Collection: Taxes
I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more.Collection: Batteries
You're a product of our language, and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you. Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way you can get out.The world is your cradle and your trap.Collection: Believe
No matter what happens, it’s always now.Collection: Matter
The world can be a lot better than we settle for. All you have to do is ask.Collection: World