Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

Probably every book I read influenced me in some small way. Authors like Jan Westcott, Kathleen Winsor, Catherine Cookson, Georgette Heyer, and even Barbara Cartland taught me to write character-driven stories.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.

I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.