Chuck Palahniuk People Quotations

You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting you.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor.

People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.

Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.

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.

My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way.

I'm trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.

I used to work as a volunteer in a hospice, but I don't have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything, so I was what they call an escort. I would take people to the support groups every night, and I would have to sit sort of on the sidelines so I could take them back to hospice at the end of the meeting.

My private history in terms of people in my life who are dead is very easy to discuss. I don't feel those people can be threatened or intruded upon now. But I am enormously protective of the people who are currently in my life, my existing friends and family. That is where the curtain is drawn.

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

People would ask me to autograph their bodies and then the next time I'd see them on tour they'd have my autograph tattooed. I decided I wouldn't write on people anymore, but I'd give them arms and legs and if they wanted those autographed I'd do that.

It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can't shut them up.

I think it's more important to write something that brings men back to reading than it is to write for people who already read. There's a reason men don't read, and it's because books don't serve men. It's time we produce books that serve men.

Since September 11, 2001, the real world has become too scary for a lot of people to be with - all the time.

Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It's kind of like trick-or-treating.

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.

My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.

I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won't have a career.'

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

My way of being with people is probably incredibly unhealthy, in that I'll be incredibly social, and I won't write a word for maybe a year, and I'll just be with people, going to parties and soaking up stories, and just sort of recharging all of my ideas.

The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.

People said that 'Fight Club' would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.

There's a television show, 'Hoarders,' where people have those homes filled with stuff. Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.

Portland is quickly becoming one of those lovely, lush Third World countries where kinda-rich people retire with their money.

You kill strangers deliberately so you don't accidentally kill the people you love.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

There are worse things you can do to people you love than kill them.

You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you.

The problem in this case was you can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker.

Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.

History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.

Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

You can’t fool people into loving you.

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.

There's worse that people can steal from you than money.

Waiters will always pee in soup, people will always fall in love.

Listen up. Rant would tell people: ‘You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.’ Sometimes Rant said, ‘You only ever is in the eyes of other folks.’ If you were going to carve a quote on his grave, his favorite saying was: ‘The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday.

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.

Some people are just born human, the rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.

Some people still think knowledge is power.

People will listen to you only when they know you're dying, otherwise they're just waiting for their turn to talk.

You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buy s a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble.

I came to Party Crashing because accidents happen. People you love will die. Nothing you treasure will last forever. And I need to accept and embrace that fact.

Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.

You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.

The future is just wasted on some people.

Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.

I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.

The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

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.

you're a product just as much. a product of a product. the people who design cars, they're products, your teachers, products. the minister in your church, another product.

On game shows, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer and dryer pair.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.

These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

At That Moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay. It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

Rant would tell people: 'You're a different human being to everybody you meet.

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. 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, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.

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...

If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.

When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

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

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.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become.

Nevertheless, if you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well... everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life.

There are the most fantastic, beautiful things and people out there. It’s up to you to find them.

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.

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

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

You can say anything if enough people will listen.

Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.

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.

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.

I spend most of my life just listening to people.

This is our world now, and those ancient people are dead.

I went to sexaholics anonymous for six months. For research. I wanted to see the structure of the groups, how they were conducted, and what the atmosphere was like, and also to be able to describe the people as human beings, rather than as the dirty jokes that they are in our culture.

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.

People who don't want to get on with their lives, and don't want to accept responsibility for the direction of their lives want to hang out with other people who don't want to accept responsibility or move on, and so you find that your entire culture around you are people who are just like you, because that's what's comforting.

they should let some people into the library by prescription only

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.

I write compulsively. I've got so many ideas, and I love to do it so much, I can't not do it. I write the way some people do drugs.

If you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane.

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.

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.

My life has been about living like a monk and looking like a priest so that people will come up to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and it might as well be me.

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.

For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

The money is in television. Books are not the dominant medium of our time, so fewer people will create them. In a sad way, books have become a form of "comfort food" we expect to lull us to sleep.

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.

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.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

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.

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?

Cults make people sing so hard for so long - because it over-oxygenates the blood and sets them up to faint.

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.

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.