Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

I know that my tendency is to be linear, and I'm trying to find ways to subvert that. And so in 'Bellocq's Ophelia' my device for subverting it was to tell the story and then to tell it again; it always circles back to this one moment, and it's not linear, but it's round in that way, and much of 'Native Guard' is like that.

There are stories within stories, whispered in the quiet of the night, shouted above the roar of the day, and played out between lovers and enemies, strangers and friends. But all are fragile things made of just twenty-six letters arranged and re-arranged to form tales and imaginings which will dazzle your senses, haunt your imagination and move you to the very depths of your soul.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

I definitely read a lot of books on the psychology and mythology behind fairy tales because I think that's really fascinating and there's a lot to draw on there.

Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice.

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded.

I always take a story that's kind of out there, like an urban myth. I take some possibility that people imagine, that they are familiar with, and try to turn it into a story.

As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their 'subjects' and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn't by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.

Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you're not feeling very well, or as a child.

The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always.

Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

It seems so easy to write about some normal event and twist it a little bit to make it into a supernatural event.

I just want to be entertained. The stories that have aged the best are the ones where the wolf eats grandma, or the woman is going to bake children in an oven, or the bear is going to eat the girl for eating the porridge. There are lessons in there, but they're deeply engrained and hidden.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

The old storytellers took the stories that meant something to them and rearranged the pieces to say something.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

The framed tale is, in my opinion, one of the most natural ways to tell a story. If you think of it, the conceit of the frame-less story is actually the odd way of doing things. Without the frame, how do you know the context for a story?

History has its truth; and so has legend hers.

I love telling stories. I think of myself as a storyteller, and I don't feel bound by being just a singer or an actress. First, I'm a storyteller, and history is stories - the most compelling stories. There is a lot you can find out about yourself through knowing about history. I have always been attracted to things that are old. I have just always found such things interesting and compelling.

Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.