Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.

You know when you're young, you have this unbelievable stupidity and arrogance and ignorance all mixed in?

I come armed with a really good ignorance. I don't strive toward ignorance. I come by it naturally.

There's nothing more arrogant or conceited than youth, and there's nothing other than machinery that can replace youth.

My first sex scene - and it was with myself.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

When I knew nothing, I thought I could do anything.

I wanted to be a farmer's wife. I thought it would be quite fun to wake up of a morning, collect eggs and have sheep and pigs as pets. I know now that it would also involve having to sleep with the farmer, but at the time I wasn't thinking about the sexual implications - I was 11.

Youth is an amazing thing: I think back on when we did The Lost Boys, and I didn't think I could do anything wrong.

As a kid when I was growing up, as any kid, you think you know every thing and I was no different to that.

I am proud of my immaturity and political inexperience.

I was like one of the boys in school who flap their legs frantically under the desk. I always had this weird feeling between my legs and I had no idea what it was. I didn't know girls masturbated. I never touched myself or anything.

Adolescence is such a fun time in your life, because you think you know it all, and you haven’t gotten to the point where you realize that you know almost nothing.

I didn't really know what I was until I came to America and I had sex [for the first time] in San Francisco in 1970. It was with someone of my own sex.

I remember the first time I had sex. I wore a cape and goggles... because I didn't know.

Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance.

Where did I get the nerve to think I could handle American teenagers? Ignorance. That's where I got the nerve.

Only ignorance! only ignorance! how can you talk about only ignorance? Don't you know that it is the worst thing in the world, next to wickedness? -- and which does the most mischief heaven only knows. If people can say, 'Oh! I did not know, I did not mean any harm,' they think it is all right.

Do ya remember the first time you had sex? I do, and boy, was I scared! I was alone!

I used to think masturbation was not really sex because it only involved me. That's a very limited view of human sexuality, and it isn't going to work for women.

I had my very first relationship at 27 because I really had not actually come to terms with my sexuality until I was 24.

Stupidity is without anxiety.

So often, over the course of our day-to-days, we forget the details of what shapes us most in life. Sure, we'll pay through the nose to have our weddings videotaped, but can we say the same thing about the first time we discovered masturbation, or the moment we realized that the true nature of the opposite sex is to lie and humiliate (and I'm not just talking about women here)? Usually not.

I was like twelve or something, when you first kiss a guy and you see the way the guy reacts, how they get really excited, or whatever. And I'm perceptive, so I think, "Ah, jeez, is that something that I'm able to do?"

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.