Chuck Palahniuk Book Quotations

In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

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

Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.

There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.

To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence.

As a culture, we believe that if we kill something, we've killed the issue. That's why so many books end with death, why so many plays end with death, because it's full resolution. I'm always curious to know what happens after Romeo and Juliet die. In a way, that's the beginning of the story. Maybe beyond the story is even better.

If you haven't already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.

I realized that my book readings were boring me. I was going to go up there and read a passage and sleepwalk through the whole event and I needed to make it more interesting. I wanted to be running and jumping and do something so that the event would be so exciting. I had to trick myself into having fun every time.

It is a hundred-year-old witch book, bound in human skin and probably written in ancient cum...YOU lick it!

This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.

I'm not really into comfort books. There are too many of those as it is. Just sort of narcotic books, like my grandmother used to read. They have value like Paxil has value, but there's plenty of them in the world already. There's a shortage of confronting, stimulating, exciting books.

The strength of film is its accessibility and immediacy. But the strength of books is that freedom to really depict anything you want because people are going to be reading it in private. So, I'm always trying to write with the immediacy and the constant motion of film but I'm also trying to write with the complete freedom of subject matter that books have.

Language is what books do very well and movement is what movies does very well.

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.

It's interesting because when David Fincher was making "Fight Club," he said, "It's a romance." And it really is. Almost everything I ever write is just a romance. And that needed to be sort of pointed up at the end of "Fight Club." The film has a very different ending than the book does.

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.

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

I see so many tattoos of my stuff on people - tattoos of my book covers, tattoos of quotes . . . it's kind of daunting sometimes.

Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise.

I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.

Books can create a depth of story, a background of information and ideas, that televison and movies can't. Sure, the television shows may shock, but only on a superficial level. They'd never risk market share to really explore the issues. They report, but don't analyze or suggest any new ways for living our lives.

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

My books are more about people experimenting with different identities and social models in a short-term way before they can break through to something authentic.