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

• The strength of film is its accessibility and immediacy. But the strength of books is that freedom to really depict anything you want because people are going to be reading it in private. So, I'm always trying to write with the immediacy and the constant motion of film but I'm also trying to write with the complete freedom of subject matter that books have.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• I can manage my own pain. I can drink. I can go to the doctor and get a prescription. I can exercise. I can write a story about it. I've done it a million times! But I don't want to see the people I love tortured and suffering.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Pain, Writing, Exercise

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

• Every character sees the world through a framework of education and experience that they're proud experts about. To write a character, find out what they know best, and THEN you'll know how they'll describe a "hot day." Or a "pretty girl."

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Girl, Writing, Character

  Source: www.bookslut.com

• I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Character, Writing, Hands

• Public taste changes and the aesthetic of a culture changes over time, so the idea isn't to appeal to the aesthetic of the moment and what people will like right now; the idea is to somehow keep yourself in the public memory so that as taste evolves it will eventually come to embrace your thing. So, it's about writing to be remembered rather than writing to be liked.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Memories, Writing, Ideas

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• My writing has to excite people and depict or include their experiences. That's part of my process - to go out and interact with people. It's very much like an archival process. I understand that the Brothers Grimm would go out and get people talking so they could document folk tales that weren't being documented any other way. I try to offer a little bit of myself - some experience from my life that evokes stories in other people.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Brother, Writing, Talking

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

• To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Book, Writing, Mean

• I take pens and I write on the inside of my arm. When I'm with people and somebody says a really fascinating anecdote, or fact, or phrase, I'll write it on the inside of my arm. At the end of the day, I'll take the very best things that are on my arm and I'll copy them into a notebook that I always carry and only when the weather is absolutely terrible will I really key the very best of that notebook into the computer. At that point, it's all sort of censored twice - only the best things go from the arm to the book and only the best things go from the book to the computer.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Notebook, Writing, Weather

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• My writing process isn't a very organized thing. The actual writing part is a tiny part of my life. I often write in public. I bring my laptop or write freehand in notebooks. Then, I'll read through them while I exercise or walk the dog. The very last thing I do is the sitting alone at the computer part.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Notebook, Dog, Writing

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

• Writers should be able to fully deduct from their taxes all writing-related expenses, including alcohol, parking tickets, court judgments, fines for lewd public behavior, Zoloft, and cigarettes.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Alcohol, Able

• 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.

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