Chuck Palahniuk Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Music, Art, Book

  Closing remarks at an eClass forum in Barnes & Noble University, December 05, 2004.

• Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Mistake, Writing, Adventure

• I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Addiction, Literature

• That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Retrospect, Versions

  Chuck Palahniuk (2004). “Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories”, NY Books

• Real writers write because they love to write. They don't write for public acclaim.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Real, Writing, Acclaim

  Source: www.nightmare-magazine.com

• It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Connections, Done

• Don't rush or force the ending. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Next, Scene

• Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, People, Fax

• The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room masturbating and making money.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Fear, Believe, Writing

  Chuck Palahniuk (2004). “Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories”, NY Books

• Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Thinking, Offensive

  "I dare you" by Dan Glaister, www.theguardian.com. March 12, 2004.

• The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Simple, Shy

• So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn’t funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it. That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can’t control life, at least you can control your version.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Looks, Retrospect

• 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.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Book, Writing, Competition

  "Chuck Palahniuk: 'I wrote the book while my mother was dying of cancer'" by Euan Ferguson, www.theguardian.com. September 03, 2011.

• People would ask me to autograph their bodies and then the next time I'd see them on tour they'd have my autograph tattooed. I decided I wouldn't write on people anymore, but I'd give them arms and legs and if they wanted those autographed I'd do that.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, People, Giving

• There's an old saying: 'No piece of writing is ever finished, it's just abandoned.' But my own rule is: No piece of work is done until you want to kill everyone involved in the publishing process, especially yourself.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Done, Pieces

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. April 18, 2013.

• And it [Fight Club novel] was written so general that my father thought I was writing about his father, and my boss thought I was writing about his boss. People really put themselves, you know, in the shoes of the narrator.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Father, Writing, Fighting

  Source: www.mtv.com

• 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. After I gave up television, I found I could carry longer and longer stories or ideas in my head and put them together until I was carrying an entire short story. That's pretty much when I started writing.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Children, Writing, Ideas

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

• I write compulsively. I've got so many ideas, and I love to do it so much, I can't not do it. I write the way some people do drugs.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Ideas, People

• Writing is like sex, if it's difficult you're not doing it right.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Sex, Writing, Difficult

• The last story you should write is the most important story. You should start with a story that is just an amusing, entertaining, fun story to write and learn your writing chops with the least important things before you start applying them to the most important things.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Fun, Writing, Important

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

• I always thought I'd write when I retired - when I turned 65. But by the time I was 33, to tell you the truth, I was a little bored with drugs and sex, and I thought I'd do the writing thing.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Sex, Writing, Bored

• 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.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Book, Writing, Dark

  Source: www.pbs.org

• What you write should entertain you and serve you first. Don't worry about maintaining anything beyond your own attention. Focus on exorcising your demons in the work. If you can do that, then you'll succeed in the world.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Worry, Focus

  "Chuck Palahniuk in conversation with Tom Spanbauer". Interview with Kathryn Borel, www.believermag.com. May 2014.

• Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Moments

  Source: www.nightmare-magazine.com

• Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dish washing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur. If you don't know what comes next in the story... clean your toilet. Change the bed sheets. For Christ sakes, dust the computer. A better idea will come.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Thoughtful, Dust

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