Chuck Palahniuk

“I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can on...”

“My publisher's been shipping me to comic-cons, and it seems that my readership overlaps perfectly with the comic-con crowd.”

“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...”

“The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wo...”

“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.”

“I'm only confrontational with my friends.”

“While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.”

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

“I write nothing but contemporary romances.”

“To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.”

“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 ev...”

“Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.”

“For me, writing is a kind of coping mechanism.”

“I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.”

“In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.”

“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?”

“I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that.”

“The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.”

“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.”

“We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.”