Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

When writing sex scenes, there is often no pleasing anyone, except perhaps the writer herself.

I am comfortable talking about sex scenes and stuff, but to me, when it's physically explicit, I do feel prudish and uncomfortable.

It's difficult for me to say, but I don't think the sex scenes are particularly erotic.

His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.

Composing was more difficult than writing things down.

If it doesn't have sex scenes in it, I won't do it.

When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.

I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

I always feel super uncomfortable when it's like ah, there probably has to be a sex scene. I feel really bad and then always look around to see if anyone is watching me while I'm writing. I want to apologize to people who have to read those sex scenes, but I feel like it's part of the characters life, it's important.

Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.

Writers have problems writing sex scenes, because writing one really well is pornography.

Pulp Fiction is a, uh, gritty, urban satire. Pump Friction is a uh-uh, a bunch of uh, dudes and ladies having dirty sex.

You could say I'd rewritten the same novel three times and I thought I had to move on. The success of the book, and then the movie, had by then also created a commercial expectation and I remember touring America and seeing people in the audiences who I thought might not want to read the books I wanted to write next. My constituency had become broader, but more mysterious to me.

I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story.

After 58 years you'd think writing would get easier. It doesn't. If you're lucky, you become harder to please. That's all right, it's still a pleasure.

It's hard if you're just touring constantly. It's like, "What am I going to write about? I'm in the van, I'm playing another show..." I'm still writing about heartbreak that happened years ago. I don't see the point of writing and putting out another record until I can do something else.

For me writing is so perplexing, because if we were playing ping pong and we weren't writing - twenty years later you'd be just so much better at ping pong and this confidence with ping pong.

If I'm writing by intuition, generally that calculation works itself out. But if I'm writing a mystery, and somebody has to have a reason for doing what he's doing, and it's not anything I can imagine myself wanting to do, things get a little more difficult to write, and careless mistakes are made.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.

I'm a writer and writers either have good memories or nothing at all.