Chuck Palahniuk quotes:

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.

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

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.

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.

I love the power of words - no music or special effects - and I want to demonstrate that power.

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.

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.

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.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

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.

At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.

When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away from other people, and my writing sucked. Now I have a laptop; I can do the most tedious part of my job in a public place.

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.

My parents divorced about the same time the movie 'The Parent Trap' came out, about two twins at camp who scheme to get their parents back together. I had that same fantasy.

People would ask me to autograph their bodies and then the next time I'd see them on tour they'd have my autograph tattooed. I decided I wouldn't write on people anymore, but I'd give them arms and legs and if they wanted those autographed I'd do that.

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.

If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.

In 'Diary,' the motto really is: 'Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?' It coaches us to be aware of our motives and not just be a reaction to the circumstances around us.

Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It's kind of like trick-or-treating.

I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won't have a career.'

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they're able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they decided.

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.

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.

Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion... What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level.

The best fights don't occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.

My father used to call me 'bird bones' and, well, the name fits.

Few things in life seem more sexy than a banned book.

Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.

I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that.

I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.

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.

My stories always have these twisted happy endings, and the boy always gets the girl.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

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 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.

Any 'artist' makes a living by expressing what others can't - because they're unaware of their feelings, they're too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood.

We're making the same mistakes we made 1,000 years ago. So they must be the right ones. So relax.

My books didn't fit a marketing niche.

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.

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 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 there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.

My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.

I write nothing but contemporary romances.

For me, writing is a kind of coping mechanism.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

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.

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

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.

I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.

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.

Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.

My goal is more to be remembered. They'll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.

I thought 'Fight Club' was great as David Fincher's version.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

My goal is never to make fun of religion.

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.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

To be honest, I hate silence.

I get a lot of letters from women who insist that 'Fight Club' is not just a guy thing. They insist that women have the same rage and need the same outlet.

We don't have friends, so we watch 'Friends' on TV.

I never think I'm making fun of my culture. In fact I'm making fun of myself, because I catch myself doing some very stupid things.

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.

The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.

If we all lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, life would be much simpler.

Since September 11, 2001, the real world has become too scary for a lot of people to be with - all the time.

I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it's good to add more emotion and chaos.

The answer is there is no answer.

Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

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.

The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

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.

Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.

Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it's not the king any more.

My grandfather was hit over the head by a crane boom in Seattle. Some of the family claimed he was never a violent, crazy person before that. Some say he was. It depends who you believe.

People said that 'Fight Club' would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.

When the 'Fight Club' movie was going into production, I quit my job so I could write full-time.

Masochism is a valuable job skill.

Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking.

I usually write in my kitchen, which is a large, octagonal room that looks into woods - three big windows look out into the trees.

A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.

You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.

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.

My writing process isn't a very organized thing.

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.

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.

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.

That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

I've got two dogs; they're Boston terriers, and they're allowed everywhere.

My way of being with people is probably incredibly unhealthy, in that I'll be incredibly social, and I won't write a word for maybe a year, and I'll just be with people, going to parties and soaking up stories, and just sort of recharging all of my ideas.

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.

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?

I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There's such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it - Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Alexander McQueen, Heath Ledger.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

My mom would spy by satellite, turning down the air conditioning, colder and colder, with a tapping keystroke via her wireless connection, chilling that house, that one room, meat locker cold, ski-slope cold, spending a king's ransom on Freon and electric power, trying to make some doomed ten bucks' worth of pretty pink flowers last one more day.

Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.

Kill me if I ever look that Bad Dude, what are you saying? On the TV? That is you, dude. From like five years ago.

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.