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Chuck Palahniuk

106 quotes

“I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying "We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything." And I'm like, "Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that’s all I did.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Rolling Stone (2002-09-19)
“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 (born 1962) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with the San Francisco Bay Guardian (2002-10-30)
“It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Salon.com Letters. Response by Palahniuk to Laura Miller's review. (2003-08-26)
“Why have I sold out? You think I'm supposed to grow old, beating some trite old protest drum that people don't hear anymore? Please; protest is now just a backdrop for a Diesel clothing ad in a slick fashion magazine. My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way. It's time — for me, at least — to be clever and seduce people by entertaining them. I'll never be heard if I'm always ranting and griping.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: You Ask The Questions," The Independent Review (2004-03-25)
“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.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: You Ask The Questions," The Independent Review (2004-03-25)
“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.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Closing remarks made on an eClass forum (Barnes & Noble University) (2004-12-05)
“I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion's leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night – as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here's Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Andrew Lawless, "Those burnt tongue moments - Chuck Palahniuk in interview", Three Monkeys (May 2005)
“All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Online chat transcript, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (2007-05-01)
“If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Haunted (2005), Chapter 21
“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.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Snuff (2008)
“The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Every play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. Even Sound and light can only go so fast.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. This isn't about quality. It's about volume. This isn't about music. This is about winning. You stomp the competition with the bass line. You rattle windows. You drop the melody line, and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword. You dominate. This is really about power.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No detail is too minor to note.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion. Someone's always spraying the air with their mood.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction. These people with dead children, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself. There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 them, but now they call this free will. At least the Greeks were being honest.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In journalism school, what they want you to be is a camera. A trained, objective, detached professional. Accurate, polished, and observant. They want you to believe that the new and you are always two separate things. Killers and reporters are mutually exclusive. Whatever the story, this isn't about you.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Imagine the books burning. And tapes and films and files, radios and televisions, will all go into that same bonfire. All those libraries and bookstores blazing away in the night. People will attack microwave relay stations. People with axes will chop every fiber-optic cable.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. So just relax, Helen Boyle told me, and just enjoy the ride. She said, "Even absolute corruption has its perks.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our footsteps echo against the concrete floor. The steel roof hums with rain. And she says, 'Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?'”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here's Big Brother, singing and dancing, force-feeding you, so your mind never goes hungry enough to think.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Until you deal with your real personal issues, you'll never be able to control yourself.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Down through the ceiling comes a fire siren and people screaming that we're supposed to ignore. The gunshots and tires squeeling, sounds wee have to pretend are okay. They don't mean anything. It's just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A woman begs someone not to rape her. It's not real. It's just a movie. We're the culture that cried wolf.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you think about it from a native plant perspective," Oyster says."Johnny Apple seed was a fucking biological terrorist.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.. He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“According to Mona, you shouldn't kill people, because that drives you away from humanity. In order to justify killing, you have to make the victim your enemy. To justify any crime, you have to make the victim your enemy.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Doctor Sarah didn't start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show," Mona says. "She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Still, he deserved to die. He called me an asshole.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The masochist bullies the sadist into action. The most passive person is actually an aggressor. Every day, just you living means the misery and death of plants and animals- and even some people. "Slaughterhouses, factory farms, sweatshops," she says, "like it or not, that's what your money buys.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In order to save the world, Jesus Christ suffered for about thirty-six hours on the cross. I am willing to suffer an eternity in hell for the same cause.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up the 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.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more people die, the more things stay the same.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This culling poem is a blessing. Why do you think it was created in the first place? It will save millions of people from the slow terrible death we're headed for from disease, from famine, drought, from solar radiation, from war, from all the places we're headed.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people. In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.”
Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source