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Books Can Create A Depth Of Story, A Background Of Information And Ideas, That Televison And Movies Can't. Sure, The Television Shows May Shock, But Only On A Superficial Level. They'd Never Risk Market Share To Really Explore The Issues. They Report, But Don't Analyze Or Suggest Any New Ways For Living Our Lives.

-Chuck Palahniuk

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Books Can Create A

Chuck Palahniuk

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Books Can Create A Depth Of Story, A Background Of Information And Ideas, That Televison And Movies Can't. Sure, The Television Shows May Shock, But Only On A Superficial Level. They'd Never Risk Market Share To Really Explore The Issues. They Report, But Don't Analyze Or Suggest Any New Ways For Living Our Lives.

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More From Chuck Palahniuk

Hey, Even The Mona Lisa Is Falling Apart.

More And More People Are Defining Themselves Not By What They Are About, But By What They Are Against, What They Are Overcoming, The Thing That Is Wrong With Them.

Our Generation Has Had No Great Depression, No Great War. Our War Is Spiritual. Our Depression Is Our Lives.

Sometimes The Very Best Way To Deal With Unpleasant Things Is To Depict Them In Ways That Allow People To Laugh At Them And Destroy The Power Of Unsayable Things, Rather Than Refusing To Acknowledge Them.

Every Time We Burn A Gallon Of Gas Or An Acre Of Rain Forest, Aren't We Killing The Future To Preserve The Present?

I Have A Secret Goal With My Editor - He Has Asthma And Uses His Inhaler, And After I Send Him A New Manuscript, I'll Have His Assistant Phone Me And Tell Me How Many Times He Had To Get His Inhaler Out While Reading A Draft. It's My Secret Laugh Meter.

You Know How Both Life And Porno Movies End. The Only Difference Is Life Starts With The Orgasm.

The Old Rule About How A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever, In My Experience, Even The Most Beauteous Thing Is Only A Joy For About Three Hours, Tops. After That, She'll Want To Tell You All About Her Childhood Traumas. Part Of Meeting These Jail Girls Is It's So Sweet To Look At Your Watch And Know She'll Be Behind Bars In Half An Hour.

After You Hear Even The Shortest Great Story, It Should Fill You With A Little Bit Of Fear.

Look Up At The Stars And You're Gone.

Love Is A Skill You Learn.

These Distraction-oholics. These Focus-ophobics.

The Same As Real Life, There Is No Happily Ever After.

A Minute Of Perfection Was Worth The Effort. A Moment Was The Most You Could Ever Expect From Perfection.

It's Nice To See Something More Pathetic Than I Feel Right Now.

We Kind Of Deny The Stages Of Life.

In A World Where Billions Believe Their Deity Conceived A Mortal Child With A Virgin Human, It's Stunning How Little Imagination Most People Display.

What You Have To Understand, Is Your Father Was Your Model For God.

So This Is Why I Write. Because Most Times, Your Life Isn’t Funny The First Time Through. Most Times, You Can Hardly Stand It. That’s Why I Write, Because Life Never Works Except In Retrospect. And Writing Makes You Look Back. Because Since You Can’t Control Life, At Least You Can Control Your Version.

What I Want Is To Be Needed. What I Need Is To Be Indispensable To Somebody. Who I Need Is Somebody That Will Eat Up All My Free Time, My Ego, My Attention. Somebody Addicted To Me. A Mutual Addiction.

If You Take My Stuff Apart, You'll Find My Choruses Of Repetitions Are Picked Up Almost Verbatim From Kurt Vonnegut, And My Distanced Fracture Quality Is All From Amy Hempel, Who's Probably My Favourite Writer.

The Religious School She Went To, Growing Up, Ms. Wright Said How All The Girls Had To Wear A Scarf Tied To Cover Their Ears At All Times. Based On The Biblical Idea That The Virgin Mary Became Pregnant When The Holy Spirit Whispered In Her Ear. The Idea That Ears Were Vaginas. That, Hearing Just One Wrong Idea, You Lost Your Innocence. One Detail Too Many And You’d Be Ruined. Overdosed On Information.

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

This Isn't About Guilt Or Innocence, He Says. The Dinosaurs Weren't Morally Good Or Bad, But They're All Dead.

What We Think Of As Halloween Is Really The Product Of Media Barons, City Mayors, And Candy-makers. You Know, Before The 1920s, Halloween Was Really A Terrible, Terrible Night.

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.

You're Not Getting This Back You Know. Consider It An Asshole Tax.

Some Of Us Are Lucky Enough To Fall In Love Once Or Twice But The Luckiest Of Us Are Those Who Find That Someone They Simply Can't Live Without And Have The Pleasure Of Falling In Love With Them Day In And Day Out For The Rest Of Their Lives. Relationships Aren't About Simply Falling In Love Once And Being Done With It, They're About Loving Someone Until The End Of Your Days And Growing That Love Endlessly.

Falling In Love

Believe In Me And Die Forever.

The Evil Queen Was Stupid To Play Snow White's Game. There's An Age Where A Woman Has To Move On To Another Kind Of Power. Money, For Example. Or A Gun.

It's Funny How You Never Think About The Women You've Had. It's Always The Ones Who Get Away That You Can't Forget.

There's Still A Thousand Places I Haven't Gone To Die.

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.

By The Time You're Thirty, Your Worst Enemy Is Yourself.

You Have A Choice. Live Or Die. Every Breath Is A Choice. Every Minute Is A Choice. To Be Or Not To Be.

The First Step To Eternal Life Is You Have To Die.

There Are Only Patterns. Patterns On Top Of Patterns, Patterns That Affect Other Patterns, Patterns Hidden By Patterns, Patterns Within Patterns.

Help Me Give Up My Addiction To Hope.

The Future You Have, Tomorrow, Won't Be The Same Future You Had, Yesterday.

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.

It's All Mirror, Mirror On The Wall Because Beauty Is Power The Same Way Money Is Power The Same Way A Gun Is Power.

When I First Started Writing, There Was No Way I'd Write A Sex Scene. That Just Seemed Impossible. That's Why In "fight Club" All The Sex Happens Off-screen. It's All Just A Noise On The Other Side Of The Wall Or The Ceiling. I Just Couldn't Bring To Write In A Scene Like That. So One Of The Challenges With "choke" Was I Wanted To Write Sex Scenes Until I Was Really Comfortable Just Writing Them In A Very Mechanical Way.

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.

Knowing Nothing

You Hear The Best Stories From Ordinary People. That Sense Of Immediacy Is More Real To Me Than A Lot Of Writerly, Literary-type Crafted Stories. I Want That Immediacy When I Read A Novel.

Just For The Record, The Weather Today Is Increasing Turmoil With A Possible Physical And Emotional Breakdown.

The Short Stories Tend To Be A Journalistic Gathering Of Anecdotes That Are Put Together To Make Something Larger.

Only After Disaster Can We Be Resurrected.

Fight Club Book

What Would Tyler Durden Do?

It's Funny How The Beauty Of Art Has So Much More To Do With The Frame Than The Artwork Itself.

I'm Not So Much A Good Friend As I'm The Savior Who Wants You To Worship Him Forever.

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.

This Was Freedom. Losing All Hope Was Freedom.

Fight Club Book

Fight Club Novel

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

Skin, Bones, Blood And Organs Transplant From Person To Person. Even What’s Inside You Already, The Colonies Of Microbes And Bugs That Eat Your Food For You, Without Them You’d Die. Nothing Of You Is All-the-way Yours. All Of You Is Inherited. Whatever You’re Thinking, A Million Other Folks Are Thinking. Whatever You Do, They’re Doing, And None Of You Is Responsible. All Of You Is A Cooperative Effort.

Every Woman Is Just A Different Kind Of Problem.

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.

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

Give Me Lust, Baby. Flash. Give Me Malice. Flash. Give Me Detached Existentialist Ennui. Flash. Give Me Rampant Intellectualism As A Coping Mechanism. Flash.

Coping Mechanisms

They're Just Words Is All. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.

For Sure, They Don't Teach You This In History Class, But In Colonial Times, The Person Who Got Left In The Stocks Overnight Was Nothing Less Than Fair Game For Everybody To Nail. Men Or Women, Anybody Bent Over Had No Way Of Knowing Who Was Doing The Ram Job, And This Was The Real Reason You Never Wanted To End Up Here Unless You Had A Family Member Or A Friend Who'd Stand With You The Whole Time. To Protect You. To Watch Your Ass, For Real.

Nothing Happened, And Nothing Kept Happening.

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.

Demons Are Former Celebrities Who Prey On Their Own Insecurities.

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

Do You Know Why Most Survivors Of The Holocaust Are Vegan? It's Because They Know What It's Like To Be Treated Like An Animal.

The Only Difference Between Suicide And Martyrdom Is Press Coverage.

They Should Let Some People Into The Library By Prescription Only

We Have Pain And Hate And Love And Joy And War In The World Because We Want Them.

Nothing Feels As Awful As Pouring Your Heart Out To Some Talk Therapist, Then Realizing This So-called Professional Is Actually Vastly Stupid And You've Just Professed Your Most Secret Secrets To Some Goon Who's Wearing One Brown Sock And One Blue Sock.

She's Not Wearing Makeup So Her Face Just Looks Like Skin.

I Take Pens And I Write On The Inside Of My Arm. When I'm With People And Somebody Says A Really Fascinating Anecdote, Or Fact, Or Phrase, I'll Write It On The Inside Of My Arm. At The End Of The Day, I'll Take The Very Best Things That Are On My Arm And I'll Copy Them Into A Notebook That I Always Carry And Only When The Weather Is Absolutely Terrible Will I Really Key The Very Best Of That Notebook Into The Computer. At That Point, It's All Sort Of Censored Twice - Only The Best Things Go From The Arm To The Book And Only The Best Things Go From The Book To The Computer.

Nothing Was Solved When The Fight Was Over, But Nothing Mattered.

Fight Club Book

Fight Club Novel

You Can Spend Your Whole Life Building A Wall Of Facts Between You And Anything Real.

Las Vegas Looks The Way You'd Imagine Heaven Must Look At Night.

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.

Screenwriters Get Paid A Hell Of A Lot More Money But Their Level Of Frustration Seems To Be So High That I Don't Want That.

I'm Never Going To Have To Work. None Of My Descendants Are Ever Going To Have To Work; This Is Going To Make Me So Much Money. It Was Such A Letdown When I Realized That Wasn't My Invention.

We Are Not Special. We Are Not Crap Or Trash, Either. We Just Are. We Just Are, And What Happens Just Happens.

Fight Club Book

What We Don't Understand We Can Make Mean Anything.

A Guy's Calling To Say He's Failing Algebra Ii. Just As A Point Of Practice, I Say, Kill Yourself. A Woman Calls And Says Her Kids Won't Behave. Without Missing A Beat, I Tell Her, Kill Yourself. A Man Calls To Say His Car Won't Start. Kill Yourself. A Woman Calls To Ask What Time The Late Movie Starts. Kill Yourself. She Asks, "isn't This 555-1327? Is This The Moorehouse Cineplex? I Say, Kill Yourself. Kill Yourself. Kill Yourself.

The Truth Is, Every Son Raised By A Single Mom Is Pretty Much Born Married. I Don't Know, But Until Your Mom Dies It Seems Like All The Other Women In Your Life Can Never Be More Than Just Your Mistress.

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.

Imagine How You’d Feel If Your Whole Life Turned Into A Job You Couldn’t Stand.

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?

Katherine Kenton Remains Among The Generation Of Women Who Feel That The Most Sincere Form Of Flattery Is The Male Erection.

It's Only After We've Lost Everything That We're Free To Do Anything.

You Always Kill The One You Love.

It Is A Hundred-year-old Witch Book, Bound In Human Skin And Probably Written In Ancient Cum...you Lick It!

When Nobody Will Look At You, You Can Stare A Hole In Them. Picking Out All The Little Details You'd Never Stare Long Enough To Get If They'd Even Just Return Your Gaze, This, This Is Your Revenge.

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

It's Because We're So Trapped In Our Culture, In The Being Of Being Human On This Planet With The Brains We Have, And The Same Two Arms And Legs Everybody Has. We're So Trapped That Any Way We Could Imagine To Escape Would Be Just Another Part Of The Trap. Anything We Want, We're Trained To Want.

You Have To Jump Into Disaster With Both Feet.

Invisible Monsters

Find Joy In Everything You Choose To Do. Every Job, Relationship, Home... It's Your Responsibility To Love It, Or Change It.

Where Would Jesus Be If No One Had Written The Gospels?

Fight Club Novel

If You Worry About Disaster All The Time, That's What You're Going To Get.

Ask Yourself: What Did I Eat For Breakfast Today? What Did I Eat For Dinner Last Night? You See How Fast Reality Fades Away?

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

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.

You Are Not A Beautiful And Unique Snowflake... This Is Your Life, And It's Ending One Minute At A Time.

Love And Life Belongs To Great Risk.

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.

Being Tired Isn't The Same As Being Rich, But Most Times It's Close Enough.

Let's All Embrace Someone Near Us. Pick Someone Special To You. Tell This Someone How You Feel.

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.

Yes, These Are Bruises From Fighting And I'm Okay With That.

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

You'll Need To Suffer To Make Any Real Art.

I Remember Selling My First Short Story And Thinking, Oh My God, I Sold Something For Fifty Dollars! That Gives Me The Authority To Say I'm A Writer And To Actually Write More Things! It Legitimized The Activity.

You Know That Old Phrase ‘those Who Don’t Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It’? Well, I Think Those Who Remember The Past Are Even Worse Off.

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 Trick To Forgetting The Big Picture Is To Look At Everything Close-up.

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.

At First, The New Owner Pretends He Never Looked At The Living Room Floor.

No One Wants To Admit We're Addicted To Music. That's Just Not Possible. No One's Addicted To Music And Television And Radio. We Just Need More Of It, More Channels, A Larger Screen, More Volume. We Can't Bear To Be Without It, But No, Nobody's Addicted. We Could Turn It Off Anytime We Wanted. I Fit A Window Frame Into A Brick Wall. With A Little Brush, The Size For Fingernail Polish, I Glue It. The Window Is The Size Of A Fingernail. The Glue Smells Like Hair Spray. The Smell Tastes Like Oranges And Gasoline.

Mylife Might Be Little And Boring, But At Least It’s Mine - Not Some Assembly-line, Secondhand, Hand-me-down Life.

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

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

You Ever Been Trapped In A World Where You're Everyone's Worst Nightmare?

Worst Nightmares

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.

Fertility Says, "can You Relax And Just Let Things Happen?" I Ask, Does She Mean, Like Disasters, Like Pain, Like Misery? Can I Just Let All That Happen? "and Joy," She Says, "and Serenity, And Happiness, And Contentment." She Says All The Wings Of The Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "you Don't Have To Control Everything," She Says. "you Can't Control Everything." But You Can Be Ready For Disaster. A Sign Goes By Saying, Buckle Up. "if You Worry About Disaster All Of The Time, That's What You Are Going To Get," Fertility Says.

With Insomnia, You're Never Really Awake; But You're Never Really Asleep.

I Don't Do Much More Than Organise Other People's Ideas And Insights And Thoughts, And Sort Of Harvest Them, And Inventory Them And Present Them.

According To Plato, We Don't Learn Anything. Our Soul Has Lived So Many Lives That We Know Everything. Teachers And Education Can Only Remind Us Of What We Already Know.

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.

If We Can Forgive What’s Been Done To Us... If We Can Forgive What We’ve Done To Others... If We Can Leave All Of Our Stories Behind. Our Being Villains Or Victims. Only Then Can We Maybe Rescue The World.

Besides, Hysteria Is Only Possible With An Audience.

Everybody's Trying To Make Every Minute Of The Present Last Forever. Preserve Every Second.

I Say Let Me Never Be Complete, I Say May I Never Be Content,i Say Deliver Me From Swedish Furniture, I Say Deliver Me From Clever Arts, I Say Deliver Me From Clear Skin And Perfect Teeth,i Say You Have To Give Up! I Say Evolve, And Let The Chips Fall Where They May!

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.

Nobody Wants To Worship You If You Have The Same Problems, The Same Bad Breath And Messy Hair And Hangnails, As A Regular Person. You Have To Be Everything Regular People Aren’t. Where They Fail, You Have To Go All The Way. Be What People Are Too Afraid To Be. Become Whom They Admire. People Shopping For A Messiah Want Quality. Nobody Is Going To Follow A Loser. When It Comes To Choosing A Savior, They Won't Settle For Just A Human Being.

In The Big Factory Of Perfecting Human Souls, The Earth Was Kind Of Tumbler. The Sale As The Kind People Use To Polish Rocks. All Souls Come Here To Rub The Sharp Edges Off Each Other. This Isn't Suffering. It's Erosion.

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

I Write Because It's A Way Of Presenting Something Without Having To Be There.

Rant Said That View Of Time Was Set Up So Folks Won't Live Forever. It's The Planned Obsolescence We've All Agreed To...'nothing Says You Have To Swallow This,' Rant Told Me. 'you Can Always Just Die.

The Truth Is, Immigrants Tend To Be More American Than People Born Here.

The Girls You Meet Are Never Very Far From Their Worst-case Scenario.

Worst Case Scenario

We Want You, Not Your Money. As Long As You're At Fight Club, You're Not How Much Money You've Got In The Bank. You're Not Your Job. You're Not Your Family, And You're Not Who You Tell Yourself. You're Not Your Name. You're Not Your Problems. You're Not Your Age. You Are Not Your Hopes. You Will Not Be Saved. We Are All Going To Die, Someday.

You're A Product Just As Much. A Product Of A Product. The People Who Design Cars, They're Products, Your Teachers, Products. The Minister In Your Church, Another Product.

Want To Talk Third-wave Feminism, You Could Cite Ariel Levy And The Idea That Women Have Internalized Male Oppression. Going To Spring Break At Fort Lauderdale, Getting Drunk, And Flashing Your Breasts Isn't An Act Of Personal Empowerment. It's You, So Fashioned And Programmed By The Construct Of Patriarchal Society That You No Longer Know What's Best For Yourself. A Damsel Too Dumb To Even Know She's In Distress.

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.

My Writing Has To Excite People And Depict Or Include Their Experiences. That's Part Of My Process - To Go Out And Interact With People. It's Very Much Like An Archival Process. I Understand That The Brothers Grimm Would Go Out And Get People Talking So They Could Document Folk Tales That Weren't Being Documented Any Other Way. I Try To Offer A Little Bit Of Myself - Some Experience From My Life That Evokes Stories In Other People.

This Is The Upside Of Already Being Eternally Damned

A Writer’s Job Is To Cultivate What Can Go Wrong.

A Writer's Job Is To Cultivate What Can Go Wrong. You're Always Looking For That Dramatic Arc Of Where Things Can Fail.

The Things You Used To Own, Now They Own You.

Fight Club Book

The Problem With Educating Stupid People Was That They Didn’t Know They Were Stupid. The Same Went For Curing Crazy People.

You're Always Haunted By The Idea You're Wasting Your Life.

You Can't Base Your Life On The Past Or The Present. You Have To Tell Me About Your Future.

It's Not Love Or Anything, But I Think I Like You, Too.

When We Die, These Are The Stories Still On Our Lips. The Stories We’ll Only Tell Strangers, Someplace Private In The Padded Cell Of Midnight. These Important Stories, We Rehearse Them For Years In Our Head But Never Tell. These Stories Are Ghosts, Bringing People Back From The Dead. Just For A Moment. For A Visit. Every Story Is A Ghost.

Deliver Me, Tyler, From Being Perfect And Complete.

It's Interesting Because When David Fincher Was Making "fight Club," He Said, "it's A Romance." And It Really Is. Almost Everything I Ever Write Is Just A Romance. And That Needed To Be Sort Of Pointed Up At The End Of "fight Club." The Film Has A Very Different Ending Than The Book Does.

The Lower You Fall, The Higher You'll Fly. The Farther You Run, The More God Wants You Back.

Just Each Of Us Being Me, Me, Me First. The Murderer, The Victim, The Witness Each Of Us Thinks Our Role Is The Lead. Probably That Goes For Anybody In The World.

You Could Go Church And You Could Describe Your Worst Behavior, Your Worst Self, And Despite Your Worst Behavior You Would Be Forgiven And Then Redeemed And Then Accepted Back Into The Community Through Communion. So You Didn't Have To Carry This Burden Your Entire Life. Once A Week You Went Someplace You Went Someplace Where You Could Really Look Terrible And Be Loved Despite How Terrible You Were.

For Thousands Of Years, Human Beings Had Screwed Up And Trashed And Crapped On This Planet, And Now History Expected Me To Clean Up After Everyone. I Have To Wash Out And Flatten My Soup Cans. And Account For Every Drop Of Used Motor Oil. And I Have To Foot The Bill For Nuclear Waste And Buried Gasoline Tanks And Landfilled Toxic Sludge Dumped A Generation Before I Was Born.

The Future Is Just Wasted On Some People.

Invisible Monsters

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

Every Masterpiece Is Just Dirt And Ash Put Together In Some Perfect Way.

So If Reality Is All A Spell, And You Don't Really Want What You Think You Want... If You Have No Free Will. You Don't Really Know What You Know. You Don't Really Love Who You Only Think You Love. What Do You Have Left To Live For?

I Love Everything About Tyler Durden, His Courage And His Smarts. His Nerve. Tyler Is Funny And Charming And Forceful And Independent, And Men Look Up To Him And Expect Him To Change Their World. Tyler Is Capable And Free, And I Am Not.

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.

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

Masochism Is A Valuable Job Skill.

It's The Marilyn Monroe School Of Medicine Where Enough Of Any Drug Will Cure Any Disease.

Does It Hurt Very Much To Die? Well, Sweetheart, Yes, But It Hurts A Lot More To Keep Living.

Without Access To True Chaos, We'll Never Have True Peace. Unless Everything Can Get Worse, It Won't Get Any Better.

My First Time I Jacked Off, I Thought I'd Invented It. I Looked Down At My Sloppy Handful Of Junk And Thought, This Is Going To Make Me Rich.

Funny Relationship

Which Is Worse, Hell Or Nothing?

There's A Terrible Dark Joy When The Only Person Who Knows All Your Secrets Is Finally Dead.

Someone Bent On Suicide Won't Have Much Sense Of Humor Left.

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.

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

Experts In Ancient Greek Culture Say That People Back Then Didn't See Their Thoughts As Belonging To Them. When Ancient Greeks Had A Thought, It Occurred To Them As A God Or Goddess Giving An Order. Apollo Was Telling Them To Be Brave. Athena Was Telling Them To Fall In Love. Now People Hear A Commercial For Sour Cream Potato Chips And Rush Out To Buy, But Now They Call This Free Will. At Least The Ancient Greeks Were Being Honest.

Falling In Love

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.

The Tiny Space, The Toilet, Two Hundred Strangers Just A Few Inches Away, It's So Exciting, The Lack Of Room To Maneuver, It Helps If You're Double-jointed. Use Your Imagination. Some Creativity And A Few Simple Stretching Exercises And You Can Be Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Heaven's Door. You'll Be Amazed How Time Flies.

Every Generation Wants To Be The Last. Every Generation Hates The Next Trend In Music They Can't Understand. We Hate To Give Up Those Reins Of Our Culture. To Find Our Own Music Playing In Elevators. The Ballad For Our Revolution, Turned Into Background Music For A Television Commercial. To Find Our Generation's Clothes And Hair Suddenly Retro.

Television Commercials

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.

Someday You Will Die, And Until You Know That, You're Useless To Me.

I Might Be A Touch Of A Sadist And A Little Bit Jejune... But At Least I'm Not A Victim, Not Any Longer. I Hope. I Hope, Therefore I Am.

We're All Of Us Haunted And Haunting.

That If You Could Acquire Enough, Accomplish Enough, You’d Never Want To Own Or Do Another Thing. That If You Could Eat Or Sleep Enough, You’d Never Need More. That If Enough People Loved You, You’d Stop Needing Love.

If A Tree Falls In The Forest And Nobody Is There To Hear It, Doesn't It Just Lie There And Rot?

With Every Lecture, You’re Forced To Look Again At Every Choice You’ve Made Over The Lesson-by-lesson Chain Of Your Entire Life. And After All These Years, You See How Little You Have To Work With, How Limited Your Life And Education Have Been. How Scant Was Your Courage And Curiosity. Not To Mention Your Expectations.

There Are The Most Fantastic, Beautiful Things And People Out There. It’s Up To You To Find Them.

Most Times, It's Just A Lot Easier Not To Let The World Know What's Wrong.

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.

And It [fight Club Novel] Was Written So General That My Father Thought I Was Writing About His Father, And My Boss Thought I Was Writing About His Boss. People Really Put Themselves, You Know, In The Shoes Of The Narrator.

How You're Still Always Trapped. How Your Head Is The Cave, Your Eyes The Cave Mouth. How You Live Inside Your Head And Only See What You Want. How You Only Watch The Shadows And Make Up Your Own Meaning.

My Writing Process Isn't A Very Organized Thing. The Actual Writing Part Is A Tiny Part Of My Life. I Often Write In Public. I Bring My Laptop Or Write Freehand In Notebooks. Then, I'll Read Through Them While I Exercise Or Walk The Dog. The Very Last Thing I Do Is The Sitting Alone At The Computer Part.

Because After You've Crossed Some Lines, You Just Keep Crossing Them. And There's No Escaping From Constant Escape. Distracting Ourselves. Avoiding Confrontation. Getting Past The Moment. Jacking Off. Television. Denial.

Why Do I Do Anything?' She Says. 'i'm Educated Enough To Talk Myself Out Of Any Plan. To Deconstruct Any Fantasy. Explain Away Any Goal. I'm So Smart I Can Negate Any Dream.

What I Did Was Pour Out About A Gallon Of Chanel Number Five And Put A Burning Wedding Invitation To It, And Boom, I'm Recycling.

Listen Up. Rant Would Tell People: ‘you’re A Different Human Being To Everybody You Meet.’ Sometimes Rant Said, ‘you Only Ever Is In The Eyes Of Other Folks.’ If You Were Going To Carve A Quote On His Grave, His Favorite Saying Was: ‘the Future You Have Tomorrow Won’t Be The Same Future You Had Yesterday.

Kids Grow Up Connected To Nothing These Days, Plugged In And Living Lives Boosted To Them From Other People.

With My Eyes Closed, I Ask If She Knows How This Will All Turn Out. "long-term Or Short-term?" She Asks. Both. "long-term," She Says, "we're All Going To Die. Then Our Bodies Will Rot. No Surprise There. Short-term, We're Going To Live Happily Ever After." Really? "really," She Says. "so Don't Sweat It.

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

Skinny Guys Fight Till They're Burger.

I Have An Experience With As Many Of My Readers As Possible That's Really Genuine. I Love It When They Write To Me, And I'm Able To Send Them Things. I Love Meeting Them In Person, And Even If It's Only For A Moment I Love Having That Physical, Touching Interaction.

Idiot People Like Angel Delaporte Who Look For A Supernatural Reason For Ordinary Events, Those People Drive Misty Nuts.

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Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Robert E. Howard

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