Quotes by Chuck Palahniuk

About Chuck Palahniuk:

Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American novelist and freelance journalist, who describes his work as transgressional fiction.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Chuck Palahniuk

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�...

Chuck Palahniuk

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we don't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.

Chuck Palahniuk

That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community

Chuck Palahniuk

Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

Chuck Palahniuk

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.

Chuck Palahniuk

We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.

Chuck Palahniuk

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine.

Chuck Palahniuk

Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper. My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapter...

Chuck Palahniuk

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

Chuck Palahniuk

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

Chuck Palahniuk

Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.

Chuck Palahniuk

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

Chuck Palahniuk

Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.

Chuck Palahniuk

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 tha...

Chuck Palahniuk

I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an...

Chuck Palahniuk

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...

Chuck Palahniuk

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.

Chuck Palahniuk

I try to forget about the expectation that's out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I'm not trying to please them. I've spent a huge amount of time not communicating with those folks and denying that they exist.

Chuck Palahniuk

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 sla...

Chuck Palahniuk

My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.

Chuck Palahniuk

Author Bio

  • NameChuck Palahniuk
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist, essayist
  • BornFebruary 21, 1962
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Journalist; Essayist
  • WorksFight Club; Choke; Rant