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Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.

Chuck Palahniuk

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Chuck Palahniuk
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Pasco
Washington
Charles Michael Chuck Palahniuk
Trained
Scare
Things

More quotes by Chuck Palahniuk

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With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.
Chuck Palahniuk
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We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.
Chuck Palahniuk
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Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.
Chuck Palahniuk
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Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a Barbie doll, a vacuum cleaner. We're all such products.
Chuck Palahniuk
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In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.
Chuck Palahniuk
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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.
Chuck Palahniuk
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Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.
Chuck Palahniuk
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I know so many writers who are a hundred times better than me and have longer, greater ideas than mine, but they gave up they stopped. The biggest talent you can have is determination.
Chuck Palahniuk
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I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.
Chuck Palahniuk
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You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.
Chuck Palahniuk
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Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn't know anything.
Chuck Palahniuk
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You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.
Chuck Palahniuk
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No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.
Chuck Palahniuk
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I have a secret goal with my editor - he has asthma and uses his inhaler, and after I send him a new manuscript, I'll have his assistant phone me and tell me how many times he had to get his inhaler out while reading a draft. It's my secret laugh meter.
Chuck Palahniuk
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People who don't want to get on with their lives, and don't want to accept responsibility for the direction of their lives want to hang out with other people who don't want to accept responsibility or move on, and so you find that your entire culture around you are people who are just like you, because that's what's comforting.
Chuck Palahniuk
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You ever wonder if Adam and Eve were just the puppies God dumped because they wouldn't house-train?
Chuck Palahniuk
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When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.
Chuck Palahniuk
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We all have some proper noun to blame.
Chuck Palahniuk
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My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst.
Chuck Palahniuk
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Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.
Chuck Palahniuk