Chuck Palahniuk: Quotes about people

“There's worse that people can steal from you than money.”

“You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.”

“You can say anything if enough people will listen.”

“People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: esprit d'Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer but it's too late. So you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So, under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party… As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway. The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do.”

“The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.”

“In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.”

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”

“People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.”

“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.”

“I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.”

“What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.”

“We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.”

“People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.”

“Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.”

“You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”

“Rant would tell people: 'You're a different human being to everybody you meet.”

“You can’t fool people into loving you.”

“Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.”

“History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.”