Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

I really enjoy researching, and for almost every piece, I research enough to write a book.

The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.

When I really want to learn about something, I write a book on it. Then the real research begins, as I begin to hear people's stories, and huge amounts of information begins to comes straight to my doorstep. Then I can write an even better book the next time!

That's how I prepare for anything - I read whatever I can get my hands on, talk to people. I'm a bit of a nerd like that.

Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.

A great many decisions just can’t be made with confidence because the data just doesn’t exist …. [however] just because we don’t have the information doesn’t mean that we can’t get it.

When I do research, I have done - 90 percent of my time is the research, the other ten percent is the writing. So I don't have to face a blank piece of paper. I can look at this as a quote that I have from somewhere.

There is no such thing as writer's block. There is only not enough information. If you can't write, learn something.

I read round the subject, I make a skeleton outline, and then I start work in the relevant archives. During the marshaling of the material, I copy the material from each archive file across to the relevant chapter in the skeleton outline.

At least half my writing time is spent researching. So for every hour I'm actually clicking on the keyboard, I'm spending another hour trying to figure out some tiny detail I need answered.

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

In the early days, I promoted the idea of spending time in libraries to gain facts that other investors didn't have. Not many people did that kind of research, so it worked.

I'm a sponge for information.

I have always felt that the Internet was a more important research tool for a writer than an artist.

I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

I'm aware of the fact that I don't know how to do it all, but I want for my blog to be a place where people can come to ask questions so that I can look for the answers for them. That's the kind of work that I did for my books, and I want to transition that to my blog for more of a community feel.

What I like most: Reading well-written sources that take me to another world for hours at a time - and being able to call that 'work!' Also, of course, finding a gem of information that is either exactly what I was looking for, or else fits perfectly into the story in some way.

I go to bars and restaurants, and I sit and I eavesdrop on people and I watch people in shopping centers and, you know, I read the newspapers and I talk to the Trenton cops, and I just get a lot of information that comes in that somehow turns into a book.

When I'm sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

I love researching, I love interviewing.

Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.

I think some people think that writers read and read and read, get the information, and then write. That's not how it works. Often, you write yourself into a dark place where you don't know what you need to know, so you go get the information.

My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.