Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago.

I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.

Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.

I kept notebooks as a kid, and they were important to me.

I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.

Of course you have memories, and these memories are convincing. But it's really at the moment when I write them down - when I write about my relationship with that Japanese boy in Ni d'Eve, Ni d'Adam - that they reach a degree of reality which is incandescent, that I've really conquered a story, understood it and feel that it is really part of me.

Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

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

Everything looks more beautiful in retrospect.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.

You look back and you remember the good, the bad and the ugly.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.

That's the great thing about songwriting: You have that time to have perspective and look back and think about all the things you'd want to say.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

Writers are rememberers.

I meet a lot of people that grew up with my career and have retired, and I just want to talk to them. I like to get a feeling from them, a feeling of the old times.

I like to tell my own story using my personality and my insight, the way I see things.

I've always kept a journal and brought storytelling into my teaching.

I look forward and see myself look back.

As I look back over my life, I've been an active person - obviously I was self-absorbed for a period of time.