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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. After I Gave Up Television, I Found I Could Carry Longer And Longer Stories Or Ideas In My Head And Put Them Together Until I Was Carrying An Entire Short Story. That's Pretty Much When I Started Writing.

-Chuck Palahniuk

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As A Child Of

Chuck Palahniuk

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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. After I Gave Up Television, I Found I Could Carry Longer And Longer Stories Or Ideas In My Head And Put Them Together Until I Was Carrying An Entire Short Story. That's Pretty Much When I Started Writing.

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The Weather Today Is Partly Angry, Leading To Resignation And Ultimatums.

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I've Been Choking To Death For Years. By Now This Should Be Easy.

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Inspirational Life

To Repeat, The Way You Get To The Huge, Impossible Yes Is, You Start Collecting A Lot Of Easy, Small Yeses.

You Turn Up Your Music To Hide The Noise. Other People Turn Up Their Music To Hide Yours. You Turn Up Yours Again. Everyone Buys A Bigger Stereo System. This Is The Arms Race Of Sound. You Don't Win With A Lot Of Treble.

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Besides, It Happens Fast For Some People And Slow For Some, Accidents Or Gravity, But We All End Up Mutilated.

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.

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.

To Hell With Housework, Our Top Priority Has Always Been Between Our Legs.

In A World Where Vows Are Worthless.where Making A Pledge Means Nothing. Where Promises Are Made To Be Broken, It Would Be Nice To See Words Come Back Into Power.

Anytime My Work Can Coax Bodily Fluids Out Of Someone, I'm Happy.

If You Died Right Now, How Would You Feel About Your Life?

A Knife, It Felt Like A Knife, And I'd Discovered That Despite Everything That's Happened, I Still Had An Endless Untapped Potential For Getting Hurt.

Untapped Potential

I Told Him To Buy Land, My Mum Says, They’re Not Making It Anymore.

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Everyone Thinks Their Whole Life Should Be At Least As Much Fun As Masturbation.

Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I'll Be Anybody You Want Me To Be. Use Me. Change Me. I Can Be Thin With Big Breasts And Big Hair. Take Me Apart. Make Me Into Anything, But Just Love Me.

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Torture Is Torture And Humiliation Is Humiliation Only When You Choose To Suffer.

I See So Many Tattoos Of My Stuff On People - Tattoos Of My Book Covers, Tattoos Of Quotes . . . It's Kind Of Daunting Sometimes.

Griping Isn't The Same As Creating Something. Rebelling Isn't Rebuilding. Ridiculing Isn't Replacing. We've Taken The World Apart But We Have No Idea What To Do With The Pieces.

You Gain Power By Pretending To Be Weak.

Maybe The Truth Is I Really Want To Like You Instead.

As We Grow Older I Always Think, Why Didn't I Do More When I Was Young, Why Didn't I Risk More?

The Lower You Fall, The Higher You'll Fly.

I Realized That My Book Readings Were Boring Me. I Was Going To Go Up There And Read A Passage And Sleepwalk Through The Whole Event And I Needed To Make It More Interesting. I Wanted To Be Running And Jumping And Do Something So That The Event Would Be So Exciting. I Had To Trick Myself Into Having Fun Every Time.

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The Rules That I Adhere To Are The Rules Of Minimalism. And Those Rules Kind Of Force Writing To Be More Filmic... To Have The Immediacy And Accessibility Of Film So That The Reader Really Has To Fill In A Lot Of The Details.

The Only Difference Between Suicide And Martyrdom Is Press Coverage.

This Is Your Life And Its Ending One Moment At A Time.

People Die', She Says. 'people Tear Down Houses. But Furniture, Fine, Beautiful Furniture, It Just Goes On And On, Surviving Everything.' She Says, 'armoires Are The Cockroaches Of Our Culture.

Art Never Comes From Happiness.

Burn The Louvre, And Wipe Your Ass With The Mona Lisa. This Way At Least, God Would Know Our Names.

People Used What They Called A Telephone Because They Hated Being Close Together And They Were Scared Of Being Alone.

Could You Hold The Chainsaw A Bit Closer To Your Mouth, Please?

As An Artist You Organize Your Life So That You Get A Chance To Paint, A Window Of Time, But That's No Guarantee You'll Create Anything Worth All Your Effort. You're Always Haunt By The Idea You're Wasting Your Life.

You Love Me. You Ignore Me. You Save My Life, Then You Cook My Mother Into Soap.

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I Would Pay Snakes To Bite Her.

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We'll Never Be As Young As We Are Tonight.

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A Little Old Lady Sitting At The Front Of The Bus Can Do Nothing To Change Civil Rights.

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The Gyms You Go To Are Crowded With Guys Trying To Look Like Men, As If Being A Man Means Looking The Way A Sculptor Or An Art Director Says.

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You Can't Be Beautiful," Brandy Says About A Thousand Times, "until You Feel Beautiful.

Hope Is Something Really Tough And Tenacious You Have To Give Up. It’s An Addiction To Break.

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Television Commercials

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A Short Story Is Something That You Can Hold In Your Mind. You Can Really Analyze How The Entire Thing Works, Like A Machine

Most Guys Will Fight To Know You. Some Guys Will Deny You're A Real Person, And Some Will Just Ignore You." The Zealot. The Atheist. The Agnostic.

Oh Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me. I'll Be Anybody You Want Me To Be.

Everything You See Is Based On Fact Of A Event Thats Already Happen, Even Light Only Travels So Fast.

Believe In Me And Die Forever.

Everyone Smiles With That Invisible Gun To Their Head.

You Cannot Be The Person They Know And The Great, Glorious Person You Want To Become. Not At The Same Time.

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.

I Just Want One Person I Can Rescue And I Want One Person Who Needs Me. Who Can't Live Without Me. I Want To Be A Hero, But Not Just One Time.

When We Don't Know Who To Hate, We Hate Ourselves.

I Am The All-singing, All-dancing Crap Of This World.... I Am The Toxic Waste By-product Of God's Creation.

I Want To Find Something Else, Unknowable, Some Place That's Not On The Map. A Real Adventure.

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.

The Joke Is, We All Have The Same Punchline.

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.

The Last Story You Should Write Is The Most Important Story. You Should Start With A Story That Is Just An Amusing, Entertaining, Fun Story To Write And Learn Your Writing Chops With The Least Important Things Before You Start Applying Them To The Most Important Things.

Parents Are Like God Because You Wanna Know They're Out There, And You Want Them To Think Well Of You, But You Really Only Call When You Need Something.

Maybe This Is Why So Many Serial Killers Work In Pairs. It's Nice Not To Feel Alone In A World Full Of Victims Or Enemies. It's No Wonder Waltraud Wagner, The Austrian Angel Of Death, Convinced Her Friends To Kill With Her. It Just Seems Natural. You And Me Against The World.

Some Of The Best Ideas I Get Seem To Happen When I'm Doing Mindless Manual Labor Or Exercise. I'm Not Sure How That Happens, But It Leaves Me Free For Remarkable Ideas To Occur.

I Know That When A Supersexy Older Girl With Hips And Breasts And Nice Hair Wants To Take Off Your Glasses And To Paint You A Smoky Eye She's Merely Trying To Enroll You In A Beauty Contest She's Already Won. It's A Kind Of Slummy, Condescending Gesture, Like When Rich People Ask Poor People Where They Summer. To Me, This Smacks Of A Blatant, Insensitive "let Them Eat Cake" Type Of Chauvinism.

It’s A Fun Playtime. Please, Don’t Kill It With Big Words.

As The Stupidest Person In The Room, I Always Had The Most To Gain.

Make Me Into Anything, But Just Love Me.

Invisible Monsters

To Merely Observe Your Culture Without Contributing To It Seems Very Close To Existing As A Ghost.

It's So Quiet This High Up, The Feeling You Get Is That You're One Of Those Space Monkeys. You Do The Little Job You're Trained To Do. Pull A Lever. Push A Button. You Don't Understand Any Of It, And Then You Just Die.

What People Forget Is A Journey To Nowhere Starts With A Single Step, Too.

Because Tanning And Steroids Are Only A Problem If You Plan To Live A Long Time.

And If You Can Find Any Way Out Of Our Culture, Then That's A Trap Too. Just Wanting To Get Out Of The Trap Reinforces The Trap.

Invisible Monsters

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.

The First Step - Especially For Young People With Energy And Drive And Talent, But Not Money - The First Step To Controlling Your World Is To Control Your Culture. To Model And Demonstrate The Kind Of World You Demand To Live In. To Write The Books. Make The Music. Shoot The Films. Paint The Art.

Maybe The Only Thing Each Of Us Can See Is Our Own Shadow. Carl Jung Called This His Shadow Work. He Said We Never See Others. Instead We See Only Aspects Of Ourselves That Fall Over Them. Shadows. Projections. Our Associations. The Same Way Old Painters Would Sit In A Tiny Dark Room And Trace The Image Of What Stood Outside A Tiny Window, In The Bright Sunlight. The Camera Obscura. Not The Exact Image, But Everything Reversed Or Upside Down.

People Had Been Working For So Many Years To Make The World A Safe Organized Place. Nobody Realized How Boring It Would Become.

May I Never Be Complete. May I Never Be Content. May I Never Be Perfect.

For Six Months I Couldn't Sleep. With Insomnia, Nothing's Real. Everything Is Far Away. Everything Is A Copy Of A Copy Of A Copy.

You’ve Thrown Down The Gauntlet. You’ve Brought My Wrath Down Upon Your House. Now, To Prove That I Exist I Must Kill You. As The Child Outlives The Father, So Must The Character Bury The Author. If You Are, In Fact, My Continuing Author, Then Killing You Will End My Existence As Well. Small Loss. Such A Life, As Your Puppet, Is Not Worth Living. But… If I Destroy You And Your Dreck Script, And I Still Exist… Then My Existence Will Be Glorious, For I Will Become My Own Master.

Stop The Excessive Shopping And Masturbation. Quit Your Job. Start A Fight. Prove You're Alive. If You Don't Claim Your Humanity, You Will Become A Statistic.

My Books Are Always About Someone Obtaining A Power To Replace The Previous Sort Of Power That They Held.

To Some Of Us, The Nights Are Too Long. To Some, The Days.

Ultimately, Everyone Is Acting Out Of What They Feel Is The Best Choice. In A Way, They're All Trying To Improve The World. And I Think That Those Basic Choices Make The World A Better Place.

The Liberator Who Destroys My Property Is Fighting To Save My Spirit. The Teacher Who Clears All Possessions From My Path Will Set Me Free.

There Was No Real Sense Of Life Because She Had Nothing To Contrast It With.

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Fight Club Novel

Having Nothing To Lose Is The New Wealth.

Nothing To Lose

Everything Is Still Falling Apart.

We're Consumers. We Are By-products Of A Lifestyle Obsession. Murder, Crime, Poverty, These Things Don't Concern Me. What Concerns Me Are Celebrity Magazines, Television With 500 Channels, Some Guy's Name On My Underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...

Just Let Your Hand Drop; And Let Fate Decide For You.

Some People Still Think Knowledge Is Power.

Knowledge Is Power

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The Most Boring Thing In The Entire World Is Nudity. The Second Most Boring Thing Is Honesty.

Because Nothing Is As Good As You Can Imagine It. No One Is As Beautiful As She Is In Your Head. Nothing Is As Exciting As Your Fantasy.

We Just Had A Near-life Experience!

Life Experience

A Good Story Should Change The Way You See The World.

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.

As If You Cut Open A Rag Doll With A Sill Name, And Found Inside:real Intestines, Real Lungs, A Beating Heart And Blood. A Lot Of Hot, Sticky Blood.

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.

The One You Love And The One Who Loves You Are Never, Ever The Same Person.

Life Is Short, Death Is Forever

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Years Of Living In The Hope That What You'll Get Will Be Better Than What You Have. Years Of Looking And Feeling Worse In The Hope That You Might Look Better.

Not Everything Is About Money. You Didn't Even Say, Hello. You Are Not Your Sad Little Wallet.

When You're Thinking About The Rest Of Your Life, You're Never Really Thinking More Than A Couple Years Down The Road.

How This Feels Is I'm Just Another Task In God's Daily Planner: The Renaissance Pencilled In For Right After The Dark Ages. The Information Age Is Scheduled Immediately After The Industrial Revolution. Then The Post-modern Era, Then The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And Between The Big Events, The Earthquakes And Tidal Waves, God's Got Me Squeezed In For A Cameo Appearance. Then Maybe In Thirty Years, Or Maybe Next Year, God's Daily Planner Has Me Finished.

Get Married Before The Sex Gets Boring Or You'll Never Get Married.

Stop Trying To Control Everything And Just Let Go! Let Go!

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It's Only In Drugs Or Death We'll See Anything New, And Death Is Just Too Controlling.

When You're An Addict, You Can Go Without Feeling Anything Except Drunk Or Stoned Or Hungry. Still, When You Compare This To Other Feelings, To Sadness, Anger, Fear, Worry, Despair, And Depression, Well, An Addiction No Longer Looks So Bad. It Looks Like A Very Viable Option.

What I'm Always Trying To Do With Every Book Is To Recreate The Effect Of The Stories We Heard As Children In Front Of Campfires And Fireplaces - The Ghost Stories That Engaged Us.

There Is Nothing Special In The World. Nothing Magic. Just Physics.

There Is A Social Contract In "fight Club" And In "choke" Where The Protagonist Has Deceived A Whole Bunch Of People. In "choke" It's All Of These People Who Think That They've Saved His Life, And Really Care About Him Because They've Embraced Him And They've Been His Saviors. In "fight Club" It's All Of These People Who Are Dying Of Various Diseases, And They Thought That Edward Norton Was Also Dying So They Allowed Him Really Strong Pent-up Emotions.

Everyone Has Something Wrong. And For A While, Her Heart Just Sort Of Flat Lined.

Only Through Destroying Myself Can I Discover The Greater Power Of My Spirit.

Fight Club Book

I Have A Lot Of Money.

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.

We Went Sailing One Time, And He Wore A Speedo, And Any Smart Woman Should Know That Means Bisexual At Least.

There's Worse That People Can Steal From You Than Money.

I Spent My Life Attacking Everything Because I Was Too Afraid To Risk Creating Anything.

Me With Nothing Left To Lose, Plotting My Big Revenge In The Spotlight. Give Me Violent Revenge Fantasies As A Coping Mechanism.

Coping Mechanisms

That Quest For Something Pretty. A Cheat. A Cliche. Flowers And Christmas Lights, It's What We're Programmed To Love.

You Realize That There's No Point In Doing Anything If Nobody's Watching. You Wonder, If There Had Been A Low Turnout At The Crucifixion, Would They Have Rescheduled?

I See The Strongest And The Smartest Men Who Have Ever Lived... And These Men Are Pumping Gas And Waiting Tables.

Nothing Of Me Is Original. I Am The Combined Effort Of Everyone I've Ever Known.

Yes, I Kidnapped That Lindberg Baby.

It Can Only Take A Moment To Waste The Rest Of Your Life.

Her Voice Makes Me Think Of Her Mouth Makes Me Think Of Her Breath Makes Me Think Of Her Breasts.

Your Folks Are God, You Love Them And You Want To Make Them Happy But You Still Want To Make Up Your Own Rules.

It’s Weird To Think The Place Where We’re Standing Will Only Be A Point In The Sky.

I Want Out Of The Labels. I Don't Want My Whole Life Crammed Into A Single Word. A Story. I Want To Find Something Else, Unknowable, Some Place To Be That's Not On The Map. A Real Adventure.' A Spinx. A Mystery. A Blank. Unknown. Undefined.

Real Writers Write Because They Love To Write. They Don't Write For Public Acclaim.

Maybe This Is Why Misty Loved Him. Loved You. Because You Believed In Her So Much More Than She Did. You Expected More From Her Than She Did From Herself.

The Best Way Is Not To Fight It, Just Go. Don't Be Trying All The Time To Fix Things. What You Run From Only Stays With You Longer. When You Fight Something, You Only Make It Stronger.

Cults Make People Sing So Hard For So Long - Because It Over-oxygenates The Blood And Sets Them Up To Faint.

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.

We Hear The Ambient Noise Of Children Singing. We Hear Lions And Tigers Roar. Hyenas Laugh. Some Jungle Bird Or Howler Monkey Declares Its Existence, Screeching A Maniac's Gibberish. Our Entire World, Always Doing Battle Against The Silence And Obscurity Of Death.

You Spend Your Entire Life Becoming God And Then You Die.

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The Feeling Is Less Like An Ending Than Just Another Starting Point.

Actually, Watching Television And Surfing The Internet Are Really Excellent Practice For Being Dead.

This Is Less Teaching Than Damage Control. You May As Well Paint A House That’s On Fire.

I Am The Child Of A Lunatic. Not A Child Of God.

You Must Realize That One Day You Will Die. Until Then You Are Worthless.

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You Only Ask People About Themselves So You Can Tell Them About Yourself.

A Baby Is Such A Blank Slate, Like Training The Understudy For A Role You're Planning To Leave. You Truly Hope Your Replacement Will Do The Play Justice, But In Secret You Want Future Critics To Say You Played The Character Better.

The Only Way To Find True Happiness Is To Risk Being Completely Cut Open.

Your Handwriting. The Way You Walk. Which China Pattern You Choose. It's All Giving You Away. Everything You Do Shows Your Hand. Everything Is A Self Portrait. Everything Is A Diary.

Put A Gun To My Head And Paint The Wall With My Brains.

Without Pain, Without Sacrifice We Would Have Nothing. Like The First Monkey Shot Into Space.

Picture Anybody Growing Up So Stupid He Didn't Know That Hope Is Just Another Phase You'll Grow Out Of.

I Wanted To Destroy Everything Beautiful I'd Never Have.

Do You Remember When You Were 10 Or 11 Years Old And You Really Thought Your Folks Were The Best? They Were Completely Omniscient And You Took Their Word For Everything. And Then You Got Older And You Went Through This Hideous Age When Suddenly They Were The Devil, They Were Bullies, And They Didn't Know Anything.

No Matter How Careful You Are, There's Going To Be The Sense You Missed Something, The Collapsed Feeling Under Your Skin That You Didn't Experience It All. There's That Fallen Heart Feeling That You Rushed Right Through The Moments Where You Should've Been Paying Attention. Well, Get Used To That Feeling. That's How Your Whole Life Will Feel Some Day.

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Fantasia Barrino

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