Chuck Palahniuk

"You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways."

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."

"No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way."

"It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling."

"Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground."

"Reality means you live until you die...the real truth is nobody wants reality."

"Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life."

"A girl calls and asks, Does it hurt very much to die?Well, sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living."

"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character... Would you slow down? Or speed up?"

"I don't want to die without any scars."

"Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine."

"Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest."

"I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off."

"If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes."

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its 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. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a mass medium. No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades."

"At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves."

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice."

"Anymore, no one's mind is their own."