Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

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Chuck Palahniuk

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 21, 1962

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

Chuck Palahniuk

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.

Chuck Palahniuk

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.

Chuck Palahniuk

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.

Chuck Palahniuk

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.

Chuck Palahniuk

My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.

Chuck Palahniuk

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.

Chuck Palahniuk

In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor.

Chuck Palahniuk

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

Chuck Palahniuk

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?

Chuck Palahniuk