Chuck Palahniuk

“If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever.”

“I dread the promotion part of my job. It's agony, especially compared to the private, at-home joy of writing. But being a grown-up means doing every part of the larger task.”

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

“I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There's such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it - Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Alexand...”

“In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You'd be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it.”

“Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.”

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

“If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably...”

“'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.”

“A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.”

“I tell everyone I interact with what I'm working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.”

“The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pre...”

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

“When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away from other people, and my writing sucked. Now I have a laptop; I can do the most tedious...”

“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 t...”

“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 th...”

“Arguing that God doesn't exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn't exist because they couldn't see them.”

“I know that I'm going to die and that you're going to die. I can't do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing...”

“Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying some...”

“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 do...”