A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.
— Chuck Palahniuk
Writing gave me the world.
The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.
My grandfather was hit over the head by a crane boom in Seattle. Some of the family claimed he was never a violent, crazy person before that. Some say he was. It depends who you believe.
I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won't have a career.'
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 part of my job in a public place.
My stories always have these twisted happy endings, and the boy always gets the girl.
We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings.
A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.
My way of being with people is probably incredibly unhealthy, in that I'll be incredibly social, and I won't write a word for maybe a year, and I'll just be with people, going to parties and soaking up stories, and just sort of recharging all of my ideas.
I always thought I'd write when I retired - when I turned 65.
My goal is never to make fun of religion.
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, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
I write nothing but contemporary romances.
I will never write a sequel to anything that I will ever write.
I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.
The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.
Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it's not the king any more.
When I first used to tour, guys would come up and say, 'Where's the fight club in my area?' and I would say, 'There isn't one.' And they'd say, 'No, no, you can tell me, you can tell me.'
My books are all fantastically sentimental.
I thought 'Fight Club' was great as David Fincher's version.
If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.
Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.
Men want to make the best use of time and want to see how something can inform them and give them a stronger sense of power.
My personal theory is that younger audiences disdain books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter.
Once I start writing, I can't stop.
My publisher's been shipping me to comic-cons, and it seems that my readership overlaps perfectly with the comic-con crowd.
At school I was lazy. But I started working when I was 15, washing dishes at a local truck stop restaurant. I was really, really bored with school, and I wanted to get a job as fast as I could. School was just so easy. There was just no challenge to it.
For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.
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 books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.
I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.
My goal is more to be remembered. They'll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.
Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.
My parents used to fight a lot, and I think they fought a lot at night, and they would turn the television up to hide the sound of their fighting.
Of the big horror movies of the '70s, you have 'The Omen,' 'The Sentinel,' 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'The Stepford Wives,' 'Burnt Offerings' - these are all romantic fatalist movies where there's a sort of glimmer of hope... but darkness wins.
The best fights don't occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.
If we all lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, life would be much simpler.
I tell everyone I interact with what I'm working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.
People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens.
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.
The bright future is that readers are accepting more varied forms of stories.
A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.
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 only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.
Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion... What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.
One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they're able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they decided.
Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.
Every author has to eventually write a food book.
Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.
As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more?
