Chuck Palahniuk Stories Quotations

Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman's right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of 'Rosemary's Baby,' or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to 'Stepford Wives.'

My stories always have these twisted happy endings, and the boy always gets the girl.

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

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

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.

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.

The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring.

Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

I could imagine myself becoming one of Marla's stories.

Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.

The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.

Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.

I really believe it's the moments we can't talk about that become the rest of our lives. It's the moments we can't process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.

Who you are moment to moment is just a story.

There's always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.

Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up.

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

Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.

What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to bw wrong?

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

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.

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

After you hear even the shortest great story, it should fill you with a little bit of fear.

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.

A good story should change the way you see the world.

If we can forgive what’s been done to us . . . If we can forgive what we’ve done to others . . . If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.

I'm really glad that I made a lot of mistakes, poorly chose my friends throughout my twenties, and didn't have a rocket trajectory that set me on one path without making any mistakes or having any setbacks. The older I get, the more I realize that it's all of these failed, horrible things from my past, and the stories that they generated, that are the things I will draw on for the rest of my life.

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.