Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Romance is dead - it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.

I abhor mere prettiness.

The only sense we still respect is eyesight, probably because it is so closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you will find something - a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation something - something which can be appreciated as material only if apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass?

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical

The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.

There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition.

Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

I'm less interested in the inside of whatever it is I own than on the outside of what it sits on.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

Every new car, you open the door, and you look at all those internal mellifluous swoopy bits, and they have no meaning.

Who is interested in that? Who is interested in the warm and fuzzy? There's enough warm and fuzzy on television.

Mushy novels, pretty pictures, pretty sculpture, decorations on the wall, nice parallel lines - make me sick.

Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.

All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.

He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

The Christmas tree, twinkling with lights, had a mountain of gifts piled up beneath it, like offerings to the great god of excess.

A pastry usually tastes better if it looks nice. A cream pastry, now that looks nice - in fact, there is nothing I mind as long as it looks nice.

The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of God’s humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity. Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of...kitsch.

Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.