Chuck Palahniuk (quotes)

Love is a skill you learn.
The damaged loves the damaged.
Art never comes from happiness.
Life is short, death is forever
Which is worse, hell or nothing?
The answer is there is no answer.
Sex pretty much cures everything.
Masochism is a valuable job skill.
The lucky ones are just born dead.
Funerals are all abstract ceremony.
There will always be an underground.
Help me give up my addiction to Hope.
I don’t want to die without any scars.
We all have some proper noun to blame.
Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit.
Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.
The damaged love the damaged. True fact.
I don’t want to die without a few scars.
Make me into anything, but just love me.
You are permanent, but this life is not.
Having nothing to lose is the new wealth.
Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.
I’m only confrontational with my friends.
She’s so thin she’s either dying or rich.
The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.
We’ll never be as young as we are tonight.
Only after disaster can we be resurrected.
Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.
The things you used to own, now they own you.
I just don’t want to die without a few scars.
Imagine a plague you catch through your ears.
Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.
It’s okay to cry as long as you’re faking it.
Who you are moment to moment is just a story.
You have to jump into disaster with both feet.
This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
The more things you own, the more they own you.
A moment is all you can expect from perfection.
Every woman is just a different kind of problem.
If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.
I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.
Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.
You can say anything if enough people will listen.
When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.
Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?
What we don’t understand we can make mean anything.
A writer’s job is to cultivate what can go wrong.
It’s just the biggest mistake I could think to make
Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience.
this is the upside of already being eternally damned
A good story should change the way you see the world.
Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.
I want my whole life lined with a topical anesthetic.
Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead.
Just let your hand drop; and let fate decide for you.
This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.
Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.
There’s still a thousand places I haven’t gone to die.
It’s not love or anything, but I think I like you, too.
Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.
Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.
It’s exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.
We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.
Maybe it’s just a daughter’s job to piss off her mother.
The weather today is an increasing trend towards denial.
Optimism is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.
It’s not living alone if you keep a rifle under the bed.
This is our world now, and those ancient people are dead.
My point is, that if I’m honest, my life is all about me.
Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.
Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!
To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days.
She’s not wearing makeup so her face just looks like skin.
You realize you have no control over how you’re perceived.
If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?
You can kill a lifetime without feeling anything but skin.
My inventory of people who can save me is down to just me.
People don’t listen, they just wait for their turn to talk.
Just for the record, how I feel right now is very terrific.
Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?
The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
We’re all going overnight express delivery straight to Hell.
If you flee from the things you fear, there’s no resolution.
The on¬≠ly thing I know is ev¬≠ery¬≠thing you love will die.
By the time you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.
The only person we’ll hate more than each other is ourselves.
So here I am. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave it.
We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.
More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can’t stop.
It’s nice to see something more pathetic than I feel right now.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.
Las Vegas looks the way you’d imagine heaven must look at night.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. I am Jack’s Broken Heart.
If You Don’t Claim Your Humanity, You Will Become A Statistic.
This is the greatest momemt of your life and your out missing it
If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.
You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.
We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.
they should let some people into the library by prescription only
I tiger can smile A snake will say it loves you Lies make us evil
The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn’t glitter and shine.
You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.
If you ask me, reincarnation is just another way to procrastinate.
My whole life is about forgetting. It’s my most valuable job skill.
Get married before the sex gets boring or you’ll never get married.
Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.
You could stab a knife right through my heart and you’d be too late.
Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up.
The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.
It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.
If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.
Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.
There’s a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.
People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.
Control the things you can control. As for the rest – God bless it all.
May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.
A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.
Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.
The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.
On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The weather today is partly angry, leading to resignation and ultimatums.
You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
you ever been trapped in a world where you’re everyone’s worst nightmare?
There are a lot of things we don’t want to know about the people we love.
If you worry about disaster all the time, that’s what you’re going to get.
Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
Most times, it’s just a lot easier not to let the world know what’s wrong.
What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.
Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.
The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.
The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.
I disconnect the telephone to keep the outside world in it’s correct place.
That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.
Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
The only thing that separates us from the animals… is we have pornography.
All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.
No mat¬≠ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.
There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.
I don’t know the difference between what I want and what I’m trained to want.
Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
College is like a fountain of knowledge – and the students are there to drink
Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.
Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.
If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
The photographer in my head says: Give me peace. Flash. Give me release. Flash.
There’s always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.
It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.
You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.
The world can be a lot bet¬≠ter than we set¬≠tle for. All you have to do is ask.
Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things – they save you.
Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.
Everyone has something wrong. And for a while, her heart just sort of flat lined.
I don’t remember the hotel rooms or the airports but I always remember the events.
What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.
Imagine how you’d feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn’t stand.
Real writers write because they love to write. They don’t write for public acclaim.
No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.
Maybe it’s our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.
Anything pretty,’ Claire will tell you, ‘it’s only for sale because no one wants it.
You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.
On a night without moon or stars you can’t see a thing, but you can imagine anything.
We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.
First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.
If you love something set it free, but don’t be surprised if it comes back with herpes.
If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
It’s weird to think the place where we’re standing will only be a point in the sky.
A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.
Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.
History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.
It’s the Marilyn Monroe school of medicine where enough of any drug will cure any disease.
Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.
We’re so structured and micromanaged, this isn’t a world anymore, it’s a damn cruise ship.
You can’t base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.
Everybody’s trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.
There’s a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead.
We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are‚Ä¶Or we can decide for ourselves.
Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.
It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one.
Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?
Not everything is about money. You didn’t even say, hello. You are not your sad little wallet.
We’ve been speaking English as a second language so long that we’ve forgotten it as our first.
I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.
The best fights don’t occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.
Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.
Don’t rush or force the ending. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.
Let’s all embrace someone near us. Pick someone special to you. Tell this someone how you feel.
A male chauvinist pig isn’t born, he’s made, and more and more of them are being made by women.
It’s funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.
Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I’m wondering how clean this gun is.
Recycling and speed limits are bullshit. They’re like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.
Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.
The greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her eternal soul.
Anybody’s true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.
To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
You ever wonder if Adam and Eve were just the puppies God dumped because they wouldn’t house-train?
There are the most fantastic, beautiful things and people out there. It’s up to you to find them.
Burn the Louvre, and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.
Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I’m an uncaring asshole and proud of it.
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
I try to get centered: Watching white moon face The stars never feel anger Blah, blah, blah, the end
For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn’t such a great skill to have.
You see, life only turns out good or bad for only a little bit. And then it turns out some other way.
Everything you see is based on fact of a event thats already happen, Even light only travels so fast.
Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.
Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing . . .
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
What they don’t teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.
Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That’s how beautiful she looks.
A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
Cassie Wright knows, the moment you make yourself available to any man, he starts to take you for granted
I need to rebel against myself. It’s the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.
The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.
Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there’s no difference between what is and what could be.
When you reach the end of your life – trust me, you won’t look back and savor the moments you spent alone.
We’ve spent so much time judging what other people created that we’ve created very, very little of our own.
The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.
You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.
You become smart when you don’t need to quote someone anymore.” I am still stupid: I quoted Chuck Palahiniuk
Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly — all these make for great stories.
In truth, the degree of anyone’s success depends on how often they can say the word yes and hear the word no.
If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more.
I am not loved. I am not a beautiful soul. I am not a good-natured, giving person. I am not anybody’s savior.
We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
Just for the record, the weather today is increasing turmoil with a possible physical and emotional breakdown.
This isn’t about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren’t morally good or bad, but they’re all dead.
The government says Rant’s alive because they need a villain. The kids say he’s alive because they need a hero.
I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let… lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
Your folks are god, you love them and you want to make them happy but you still want to make up your own rules.
You couldn’t have small, dying children in a movie without really bringing everyone down, but you can in comics.
After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we’ve got a story about absolutely everything.
I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived… and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables.
No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
It’s my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.
Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine – not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.
Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.
A writer’s job is to cultivate what can go wrong. You’re always looking for that dramatic arc of where things can fail.
There’s no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can’t re-create what’s over.
You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception.
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.
Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.
People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.
Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… it’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.
Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?
You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.
Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It’s like stealing something valuable they don’t even know they own.
Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?
Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It’s because they know what it’s like to be treated like an animal.
Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.
Don’t ask me when be¬≠cause I don’t re¬≠mem¬≠ber, but some¬≠where along the way I keep for¬≠get¬≠ting to com¬≠mit sui¬≠cide.
That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can’t control life, at least you can control your version.
No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you’ll never be totally happy.
I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful.
It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.
The girl is infectious human waste, and she’s confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing and so she won’t commit to anything.
The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.
It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.
Her mom and dad are both doctors and want her to follow her dream, not turn out the way they have, no matter how much it costs them.
To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence.
If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.
What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to bw wrong?
Regret, Daisy knew, was the only confirmation of a well-lived life. If you didn’t occasionally go too far, you weren’t going anywhere.
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?
For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose … watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.
Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.
Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.
I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.
The liberator who destroys my property is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free.
My first time I jacked off, I thought I’d invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.
The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.
Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can’t live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.
Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
Every stage of life has its own form of power, and we’re always sort of terrified as to whether we can make the jump to the next form of power.
The voice says, maybe you don’t go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don’t do. The things you don’t finish.
There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns.
HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it’s so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
The career of a movie star consists of helping everyone else forget their troubles. Using charm and beauty and good cheer to make life look easy.
I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything… I wish, just once, I could say, ‘This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.
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.
I always really curious to see how people interpret things. I know my version, and I’m kind of bored with my version so I want to see their version.
In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it’s stunning how little imagination most people display.
some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.
When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.
“Getting fired,” Tyler says, “is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives.”
A knife, it felt like a knife, and I’d discovered that despite everything that’s happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.
And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.
Parents are like God because you wanna know they’re out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.
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.
Brandy is so attractive you could chop her head off and put it on blue velvet in the window at Tiffany’s and somebody would buy it for a million dollars.
And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.
Maybe this is why Misty loved him. Loved you. Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself.
For years now, I’ve wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.
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.
Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.
If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.
Years of living in the hope that what you’ll get will be better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling worse in the hope that you might look better.
Your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. Then puberty makes you Satan, just because you want something better.
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.
You realize that there’s no point in doing anything if nobody’s watching. You wonder, if there had been a low turnout at the crucifixion, would they have rescheduled?
Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here.
I’m not sure what we’re running from. Nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up. Getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if running we won’t have to get on with our lives.
Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.
It only takes one mistake and nothing else you ever do will matter. No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you’ll always be known for that one poor choice.
I really believe it’s the moments we can’t talk about that become the rest of our lives. It’s the moments we can’t process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.
This would be…a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.
Why do I do anything?’ she says. ‘I’m educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I’m so smart I can negate any dream.
I’m always identifying some fallacy in my own life. I’m sort of making fun of myself by exploring and unpacking just why I’m sort of automatically thrown to be a certain way.
I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.
This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you.
What we think of as Halloween is really the product of media barons, city mayors, and candy-makers. You know, before the 1920s, Halloween was really a terrible, terrible night.
The air will always be to filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.
Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I’m doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I’m not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.
Griping isn’t the same as creating something. Rebelling isn’t rebuilding. Ridiculing isn’t replacing. We’ve taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.
Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you’re a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.
What I’m always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces – the ghost stories that engaged us.
The body ages. grows. passes through near-lunatic phases of reproductive frenzy, but you are born and die essentially the same person. That… that is proof of your deathless soul.
…no way could I fall in love. I just couldn’t go there yet. Settle for less. I didn’t want to process through anything. I didn’t want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations.
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand 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.
I believe in something. But I don’t believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.
People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.
Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.
From famous artists to building contractors, we all want to leave our signature. Our lasting effect. Your life after death. We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.
No, none of us seem so very real. We’re only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.
Narrator: You had to give it to him: he had a plan. And it started to make sense, in a Tyler sort of way. No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.
And if you believe that we really have free will, then you know that God can’t really control us. And since God can’t control us, all God does is watch and change channels when He gets bored.
I’m never going to have to work. None of my descendants are ever going to have to work; this is going to make me so much money. It was such a letdown when I realized that wasn’t my invention.
I always thought I’d write when I retired – when I turned 65. But by the time I was 33, to tell you the truth, I was a little bored with drugs and sex, and I thought I’d do the writing thing.
The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.
People die’, she says. ‘People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything.’ She says, ‘Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture.
Writers should be able to fully deduct from their taxes all writing-related expenses, including alcohol, parking tickets, court judgments, fines for lewd public behavior, Zoloft, and cigarettes.
You don’t care where I live or how I feel, or what I eat or how I feed my kids or how I pay the doctor if I get sick, and yes I am stupid and bored and weak, but I am still your responsibility.
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 they’d even just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.
At the last minute, I couldn’t wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn’t want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on someone’s front stoop.
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 fine.
What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.
The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.
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.
How can you possibly believe he really loves you?‚Äù Miss Sneezy looks from the Mother to the Saint to Mr. Whittier’s hand.‚ÄúYou have no choice,‚Äù Mr. Whittier tells her. ‚ÄúIf you need to be loved.
The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don’t know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.
Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.
How you’re still always trapped. How your head is the cave, your eyes the cave mouth. How you live inside your head and only see what you want. How you only watch the shadows and make up your own meaning.
These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.
If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.
If we can forgive what’s been done to us… If we can forgive what we’ve done to others… If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
To preserve yourself as the center of the world, to stay your own best authority on everything, your own expert on all topics, infallible, omniscient. Always, every time of the month, forever: Use birth control.
There’s an opposite to d√©j√† vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.
Tyler lies back and asks, “If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing?” I say, goodnight. The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling and Tyler says, “Clawing at the lid of her coffin.
If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?
Taste is such a changing thing. Every age our tastes change. But the things that really last aren’t necessarily the best or the worst or the most loved things, but they’re the things that make the biggest impression.
People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
Because after you’ve crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them. And there’s no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.
In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was kind of tumbler. The sale as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. This isn’t suffering. It’s erosion.
My stories tend to bring people from isolation into community – with at least one other person, usually with a whole community of people – so that they find themselves accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.
Everyone holds a certain type of power. For young people, it’s their youth, their attractiveness, and their energy. But they’re terrified that as those qualities fade, what are they going to replace that form of power with?
I hate how on TV they have to fill so many minutes. It means they have to put in anything, and by doing so they sort of trivialize news; news becomes this commodity that they need to fill dead time between commercials with.
That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing. That if you could eat or sleep enough, you’d never need more. That if enough people loved you, you’d stop needing love.
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can’t be explained and understood.
We are a nation of physical animals who have forgotten how much we enjoy being that. We are cushioned by this kind of make-believe, unreal world and have no idea what we can survive because we are never challenged or tested.
We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part. If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
Even if I overcompensate, nobody will ever want me. Not Seth. Not my folks. You can’t kiss someone who has no lips. Oh, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I’ll be anybody you want me to be
I want out of the labels. I don’t want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that’s not on the map. A real adventure.’ A spinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined.
Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise.
Angel says that rich people don’t like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn’t pretty and perfect. You can’t put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.
You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception. Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet where your wife and kid wait. Silence, not heaven, would be reward enough.
Nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you’ve just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who’s wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.
I have a secret goal with my editor – he has asthma and uses his inhaler, and after I send him a new manuscript, I’ll have his assistant phone me and tell me how many times he had to get his inhaler out while reading a draft. It’s my secret laugh meter.
You humiliate a rich person and they’re still rich. You humiliate a brilliant person and they’re still smart. A person who is well connected is still the king of England. But if you humiliate a young person, you take away the only form of power they have.

Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.
When you understand, that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.
I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things. Only end them.
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’ll be dead.
The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our heads says, “I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I’m not Gay or Black or a Jew.” Meaning: I may be me- but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU.
The last story you should write is the most important story. You should start with a story that is just an amusing, entertaining, fun story to write and learn your writing chops with the least important things before you start applying them to the most important things.
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.
When you’re an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.
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. It’s no wonder Waltraud Wagner, the Austrian Angel of Death, convinced her friends to kill with her. It just seems natural. You and me against the world.
Scratch any fortune and you’ll find blood only a generation or two back…child labor in mines or mills…Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.
We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.
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.
Rant Casey used to say, “No matter what happens, it’s always now…” Talk about cryptic. I think what Rant meant was, we live in the present moment of reality, and no matter what’s come before, no matter how much we loved a person or a dog, when it attacks us we’ll react to that moment of danger.
With my eyes closed, I ask if she knows how this will all turn out. “Long-term or short-term?” she asks. Both. “Long-term,” she says, “we’re all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we’re going to live happily ever after.” Really? “Really,” she says. “So don’t sweat it.
We’re all trapped. It’s always 1734. All of us, we’re stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.
Personal identity seems like it’s just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’ to Jay Gatsby in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you’re given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?
I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.
There’s a big difference between “not caring” or being “nihilistic” about a topic and simply not being enrolled by the drama presented by other people. Just because my characters choose not to react in standard, socially-appropriate ways – that does not mean they don’t care. They just reject ordinary dramas.
So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn’t funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it. That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can’t control life, at least you can control your version.
That guy behind me on the airplane? He’s been kicking my seat because he hates me. He’s kicking my seat because he hates me and I’m gonna kill him. When we get off this plane, I’m gonna make eye contact. I’m gonna kill that guy. And all of that is just stuff in my head, but it’s good to get rid of that stuff.
Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. And the phone rang and Tyler answered. “If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.” May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
Books can create a depth of story, a background of information and ideas, that televison and movies can’t. Sure, the television shows may shock, but only on a superficial level. They’d never risk market share to really explore the issues. They report, but don’t analyze or suggest any new ways for living our lives.
If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing ‘real’ was at risk, what would you do? You’d live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That’s what the ghosts want us to do – all the exciting things they no longer can.
I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
I think, in a way, I invented the term ‘fight club’ and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I’ve been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.
Some stories, she’d say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.
Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain.
As a culture, we believe that if we kill something, we’ve killed the issue. That’s why so many books end with death, why so many plays end with death, because it’s full resolution. I’m always curious to know what happens after Romeo and Juliet die. In a way, that’s the beginning of the story. Maybe beyond the story is even better.
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.
When you go out with a drunk, you’ll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you’re drinking, drinking is okay. Two’s company. Drinking is fun. If there’s a bottle, even if your glass isn’t empty, a drunk, he’ll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own. This only looks like generosity.
When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.
Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can’t understand. We hate to give up those 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.
The same architect who designed the Seattle fair’s futuristic Science Center, with its lacy Gothic arches and spires, Minoru Yamasaki, was hired to design the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Seattle had promised fairgoers a glimpse of the world that would exist in 2001. That year eventually unfolded as something less than the dream we’d imagined.
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 chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can’t leave the project until it’s done.
Marla tells me how in the wild you don’t see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren’t meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks.
In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can’t scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I’d say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.
Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junk yard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We’d go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she’s so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she’s just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
So often with beginning writers, the story that they want to start with is the most important story of their life – my molestation, my this, my horrible drug addiction – they want to tell that most important story, and they don’t have the skills to tell it yet, so it ends up becoming a comedy. A powerful story told poorly becomes funny, it just makes people laugh behind their hands.
I’m giving you my life to prove to myself I can, I really can love somebody. Even when I’m not getting paid, I can give love and happiness and charm. You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody.
I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smoky eye she’s merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she’s already won. It’s a kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive “let them eat cake” type of chauvinism.
People didn’t know who I was or why I was there, so they started inventing stories about me. I was a registered sex offender and I’d just been released from prison and was being forced to do community-service work. I was a murderer, an arsonist – all these horrific things had been projected on me because no one knew what to make of this white guy who showed up and made toast at 5 o’clock every morning.
The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.
Some of us are lucky enough to fall in love once or twice but the luckiest of us are those who find that someone they simply can’t live without and have the pleasure of falling in love with them day in and day out for the rest of their lives. Relationships aren’t about simply falling in love once and being done with it, they’re about loving someone until the end of your days and growing that love endlessly.
Want to talk third-wave feminism, you could cite Ariel Levy and the idea that women have internalized male oppression. Going to spring break at Fort 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 patriarchal society that you no longer know what’s best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to even know she’s in distress.
We don’t need women. There are plenty other things in the world to have sex with, just go to a sexaholics meeting and take notes. There’s microwaved watermelons. There’s the vibrating handles of lawn mowers right at crotch level. There’s vacuum cleaners and beanbag chairs. Internet sites. All those old chat room sex hounds pretending to be sixteen-year-old girls. For serious, old FBI guys makes the sexiest cyberbabes.
When I first started writing, there was no way I’d write a sex scene. That just seemed impossible. That’s why in “Fight Club” all the sex happens off-screen. It’s all just a noise on the other side of the wall or the ceiling. I just couldn’t bring to write in a scene like that. So one of the challenges with “Choke” was I wanted to write sex scenes until I was really comfortable just writing them in a very mechanical way.
It’s creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos. What it’s going to be, I don’t know. Even after all that rushing around, where we’ve ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And maybe knowing isn’t the point. Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.
My writing has to excite people and depict or include their experiences. That’s part of my process – to go out and interact with people. It’s very much like an archival process. I understand that the Brothers Grimm would go out and get people talking so they could document folk tales that weren’t being documented any other way. I try to offer a little bit of myself – some experience from my life that evokes stories in other people.
A guy’s calling to say he’s failing algebra II. Just as a point of practice, I say, Kill yourself. A woman calls and says her kids won’t behave. Without missing a beat, I tell her, Kill yourself. A man calls to say his car won’t start. Kill yourself. A woman calls to ask what time the late movie starts. Kill yourself. She asks, “Isn’t this 555-1327? Is this the Moorehouse CinePlex? I say, Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself.
For sure, they don’t teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who’d stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real.
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. what we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.
It only takes one mistake,’ the Dan Banyan guy says, ‘and nothing else you ever do will matter.’ With his empty hand, he takes one of my hands. His fingers feel hot, fever-hot, and pounding with his heartbeats. He turns my hand palm-up saying, ‘No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you’ll always be known for that one poor choice.’ He sets the blue pill on my palm, saying, ‘Do that one wrong thing- and you’ll be dead for the rest of your life.
Most people would never admit it, but they’d been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.
You’re a product of our language, and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you. Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You’re safe because you’re so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can’t imagine any way to escape. There’s no way you can get out.The world is your cradle and your trap.
You’ve thrown down the gauntlet. You’ve brought my wrath down upon your house. Now, to prove that I exist I must kill you. As the child outlives the father, so must the character bury the author. If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living. But‚Ä¶ If I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still exist‚Ä¶ then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master.
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.
You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God. If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God? What you end up doing is you spend your life searching for a father and God. What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.
Intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don’t want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they’re emotional or spiritual. I’m trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them.
How this feels is I’m just another task in God’s daily planner: The Renaissance pencilled in for right after the Dark Ages. The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Post-Modern Era, then The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and tidal waves, God’s got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God’s daily planner has me finished.
Fertility says, “Can you relax and just let things happen?” I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen? “And Joy,” she says, “and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment.” She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. “You don’t have to control everything,” she says. “You can’t control everything.” But you can be ready for disaster. A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up. “If you worry about disaster all of the time, that’s what you are going to get,” Fertility says.
This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window. You had their full attention. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. And when they spoke, they weren’t just telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.
Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells ‚Äústop!‚Äù, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: the fights are bare knuckle. No shirt, no shoes, no weapons. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.
I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, ‘Why?’ Why did I cause so much pain? Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, ‘No, that’s not right.’ Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.
I take pens and I write on the inside of my arm. When I’m with people and somebody says a really fascinating anecdote, or fact, or phrase, I’ll write it on the inside of my arm. At the end of the day, I’ll take the very best things that are on my arm and I’ll copy them into a notebook that I always carry and only when the weather is absolutely terrible will I really key the very best of that notebook into the computer. At that point, it’s all sort of censored twice – only the best things go from the arm to the book and only the best things go from the book to the computer.
Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

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About Chuck Palahniuk

Quotes by Chuck Palahniuk