Authors:

Chuck Palahniuk Quotes - Page 37

All Quotes Addiction Adventure Age Art Brandy Bullshit Cancer Caring Change Chaos Character Children Choices Church College Community Consumerism Crash Creativity Culture Dancing Death Drama Dying Effort Ego Energy Evil Exercise Expectations Failing Falling In Love Fate Fear Feelings Fighting Freedom Fun Funeral Future Giving Giving Up Growing Up Happiness Hate Heart Heaven Hell Home Horror House Humanity Hurt Husband Identity Ignorance Imagination Insomnia Inspirational Inspiring Joy Kissing Language Life Lifetime Literature Live Life Love Lying Makeup Memories Metaphor Mom Moon Pain Past Quality Quitting Reading Reality Recycling Rejection Responsibility Revenge Risk Romance Running Sadness School Selling Silence Singing Skins Sleep Soul Suffering Talent Today Tragedy Training Travel Truth Values Waiting Wall War Wisdom Worry Writing
There's an old saying: 'No piece of writing is ever finished, it's just abandoned.' But my own rule is: No piece of work is done until you want to kill everyone involved in the publishing process, especially yourself.

There's an old saying: 'No piece of writing is ever finished, it's just abandoned.' But my own rule is: No piece of work is done until you want to kill everyone involved in the publishing process, especially yourself.

Chuck Palahniuk
Writing, Done, Pieces
Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. April 18, 2013.

Hey, you created me! I didn't create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!

Chuck Palahniuk
Responsibility, Feel Better, Ego
"Fight Club". www.imdb.com. 1999.

It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.

Chuck Palahniuk
Jobs, Space, Feelings
Chuck Palahniuk (2005). “Fight Club: A Novel”, p.12, W. W. Norton & Company

Part of her doing suicide intervention is my caseworker has to mix me another gin and tonic.

Chuck Palahniuk
Suicide, Gin And Tonic, Gin
Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Survivor: A Novel”, p.126, W. W. Norton & Company

Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

Chuck Palahniuk
Suicide, Self Harm, Fall
Chuck Palahniuk (2005). “Fight Club: A Novel”, p.49, W. W. Norton & Company

To a certain extent everybody has a certain sort of way of being a persona that they learn how to be when they're really little. They figure out that if they're really funny, or really pretty, or if they work really, really hard or are really smart, then that's what's going to get them by. That is what is going to make people like them.

Chuck Palahniuk
Smart, People, Littles
Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

The strength of film is its accessibility and immediacy. But the strength of books is that freedom to really depict anything you want because people are going to be reading it in private. So, I'm always trying to write with the immediacy and the constant motion of film but I'm also trying to write with the complete freedom of subject matter that books have.

Chuck Palahniuk
Book, Reading, Writing
Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

I have to have everything in my life completely fixed and perfect and cleaned up and I have to be complete with everyone in my life and I have seven days in which to do that. So I might make it to day three or four, but I've never made it all the way to day seven.

Chuck Palahniuk
Perfect, Might, Way
Source: www.pbs.org

A good story isn't the one that shuts everyone down and sort of leaves them in silent awe. A good story is one that, even before you finish the anecdote, you can see their eyes shining because it has so resonated with something from their own lives that everyone in the group has a version of the same story and they cannot wait to tell it, and that they're going to compete to make their version even more extreme than your version. So your version is just a seed.

Chuck Palahniuk
Eye, Waiting, Shining
Source: www.esquire.com

I think it's just a matter of time before everybody realizes that I'm kind of a romance novelist ... that these are all stories about people kind of falling back in love or struggling with relationships. Even Fight Club was just a big romantic ending.

Chuck Palahniuk
Struggle, Fall, Fighting
Source: www.esquire.com

I'm not really into comfort books. There are too many of those as it is. Just sort of narcotic books, like my grandmother used to read. They have value like Paxil has value, but there's plenty of them in the world already. There's a shortage of confronting, stimulating, exciting books.

Chuck Palahniuk
Book, Grandmother, Comfort
Source: www.avclub.com

I didn't use anybody's story. I used the context and the structure of the situation. People were so, so desperate to tell their story and begin to digest their experience - like turning it into a story - that after the fist few weeks I could go with a pad and pencil and take notes. People didn't seem at all bothered by that.

Chuck Palahniuk
People, Stories, Use
"Chuck Palahnuik On "Choke"". Interview with Cole Smithey, www.colesmithey.com. September 24, 2008.

All major publishing houses have these big fat biographies sitting there, waiting for people to die. All you have to do is slap on the end and put in on the market. It's that kind of commoditization and completion of your life before you die - and this kind of imposition of a public idea of self that replaces the actual living self - that I find so frightening.

Chuck Palahniuk
Ideas, Publishing House, Self
"Chuck Palahniuk in conversation with Tom Spanbauer". Interview with Kathryn Borel, www.believermag.com. May 2014.

My books are always about someone obtaining a power to replace the previous sort of power that they held.

Chuck Palahniuk
Book, Obtaining
Source: www.nightmare-magazine.com

My books do have a sort of romantic community at the end - people coming together. But on a more basic level, I always see them as being about power, in the same way that Harry Potter books are pitched to a population of young people who really have no power.

Chuck Palahniuk
Book, People, Community
Source: www.nightmare-magazine.com

That's how a good story works. It changes how you feel. It brings you to a greater appreciation, a greater joy, of your own existence.

Chuck Palahniuk
Appreciation, Joy, How You Feel
Source: www.lightspeedmagazine.com

After you hear even the shortest great story, it should fill you with a little bit of fear.

Chuck Palahniuk
Littles, Stories, Should
Source: www.lightspeedmagazine.com

I'm working harder than I have ever worked in my entire life, but what the hell, my life is my job now, and my job is my life and that's the way it should be.

Chuck Palahniuk
Jobs, Way, Life Is

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.

Chuck Palahniuk
Children, Writing, Ideas
Source: www.writersdigest.com

What you write should entertain you and serve you first. Don't worry about maintaining anything beyond your own attention. Focus on exorcising your demons in the work. If you can do that, then you'll succeed in the world.

Chuck Palahniuk
Writing, Worry, Focus
"Chuck Palahniuk in conversation with Tom Spanbauer". Interview with Kathryn Borel, www.believermag.com. May 2014.

People take conventional ways that other people have always decorated their cars, and use them as ways of giving other people permission to approach them.

Chuck Palahniuk
People, Giving, Car
Interview with Jeff Sartain, strangehorizons.com. October 16, 2006.

You don't have ideas when you're sitting in that sort of sterile little place, and you're not around people. The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone. I just need that dynamic of other people around me to get my work done.

Chuck Palahniuk
Character, Ideas, People
Source: www.avclub.com

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.

Chuck Palahniuk
Together, Stories, Gathering
Source: www.nightmare-magazine.com

With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.

Chuck Palahniuk
Emotional, Years, Issues
Source: www.nightmare-magazine.com

I'm fascinated by the whole issue of arousal addiction, which seems to be mostly a problem for young men.

Chuck Palahniuk
Men, Issues, Addiction
Source: the-talks.com

You May Also Like: