Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking.
— Chuck Palahniuk
A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.
When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don't want to distract myself from anything.
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
I usually write in my kitchen, which is a large, octagonal room that looks into woods - three big windows look out into the trees.
The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.
If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.
So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies; they're lived through what we watch on television - they're not actual events in our life.
I think Chris Brown gets kind of dismissed as a gay writer, and I think Chris's books are really, really smart. I wish his books sold a little more widely.
Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.
People said that 'Fight Club' would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.
I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that.
If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever.
If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.
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.
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.
At the age of 31, I realized, 'Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.'
My policy is to not read any reviews.
I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.
My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for export to Israel. It took us years to get through.
My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.
The best thing about getting a flu shot is that you never again need to wash your hands. That's how I see it.
My parents divorced about the same time the movie 'The Parent Trap' came out, about two twins at camp who scheme to get their parents back together. I had that same fantasy.
I've got two dogs; they're Boston terriers, and they're allowed everywhere.
Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.
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 writing process isn't a very organized thing.
Movie brawls tend to be bloodless and quick.
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.
Portland is quickly becoming one of those lovely, lush Third World countries where kinda-rich people retire with their money.
To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
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.
Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.
My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level.
My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way.
When I visit my brother in South Africa, I order things I've only seen in zoos. Little deers and kudu, all the mammals you would never think of eating.
My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.
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.
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.
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, Alexander McQueen, Heath Ledger.
We don't have friends, so we watch 'Friends' on TV.
When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.
I haven't had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case.
I get a lot of letters from women who insist that 'Fight Club' is not just a guy thing. They insist that women have the same rage and need the same outlet.
David Fincher is a genius.
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.
Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous 'heavy' in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.
I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.
When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she'd read a dozen a month.
Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.
