Chuck Palahniuk

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.

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

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

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

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

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.

I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.

Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.

I have a lot of money.

I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.

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.

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

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.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

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

Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.