Top 500 Chuck Palahniuk Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

352. “And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

353. “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

354. “Let’s all embrace someone near us. Pick someone special to you. Tell this someone how you feel.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

355. “To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

356. “You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

357. “What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

358. “And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that’s a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

359. “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?”

— Chuck Palahniuk

360. “You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

361. “Now is the autumn of our ennui.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

362. “As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that’s no guarantee you’ll create anything worth all your effort. You’re always haunt by the idea you’re wasting your life.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

363. “We’re the culture that cried wolf.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

364. “Any ‘artist’ makes a living by expressing what others can’t – because they’re unaware of their feelings, they’re too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

365. “You’re that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat’s ass about.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

366. “I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the savior who wants you to worship him forever.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

367. “These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

368. “A happy past cripples people. They cling to it with nowhere better to go. Nothing to improve upon.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

369. “There’s a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

370. “The government says Rant’s alive because they need a villain. The kids say he’s alive because they need a hero.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

371. “In truth, the degree of anyone’s success depends on how often they can say the word yes and hear the word no.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

372. “Anytime my work can coax bodily fluids out of someone, I’m happy.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

373. “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.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

374. “Cassie Wright knows, the moment you make yourself available to any man, he starts to take you for granted.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

375. “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.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

376. “No matter how bad things get, you can still walk away.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

377. “My inventory of people who can save me is down to just me.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

378. “Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

379. “Like it or not, the road to Hell is paved with sustainable bamboo flooring.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

380. “Suicide is very contagious.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

381. “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.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

382. “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.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

383. “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.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

384. “Maybe self-destruction is the answer.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

385. “Just because it’s anal intercourse doesn’t mean it’s not love.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

386. “This is the greatest momemt of your life and your out missing it.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

387. “We kind of deny the stages of life.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

388. “Solitude is a natural place for a writer to be.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

389. “Death is the One Big Mistake that none of us EVER plans to make.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

390. “Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive – or praising you after you ain’t.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

391. “For the most part my friends can always be more entertaining than the tube ever can be.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

392. “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.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

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

— Chuck Palahniuk

394. “More and more people are defining themselves not by what they are about, but by what they are against, what they are overcoming, the thing that is wrong with them.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

395. “You realize you have no control over how you’re perceived.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

396. “Writing is like sex, if it’s difficult you’re not doing it right.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

397. “Optimism is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

398. “By the time you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

399. “You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

400. “I’m sorry if this all seems a little rushed and desperate. It is.”

— Chuck Palahniuk