Chuck Palahniuk Quotations

Your heart is my piñata.

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

I just don't want to die without a few scars.

You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

Which is worse: Hell or nothing?

We just had a near-life experience!

Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.

Hysteria is only possible with an audience.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.

The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flipping check clears.

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?

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

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

Beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

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 she'd even just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.

Marla, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can't.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

How sweet! You still believe in death... that's just so... quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me.

All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss.

Going to spring break at Ft. 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 a patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to know she is even in distress.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

The weather today is an increasing trend towards denial.

Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up.

I see all this potential, and I see us squandering it. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Art never comes from happiness.

There's always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.