YouSaid · the spoken record

Chuck Palahniuk

lines on the record: 78
first: 2020-09-02
most recent: 2020-09-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And give ships the impression that there was a harbor there so that ships would crash on the rocks. And then the wreckers would loot the ships and kill any survivors. And so Daphne DeMarrier very romanticized looting. Okay, white people do it too. Looting. And so it was delightful that my friends who had read Invisible Monsters remembered that I had looted trains as a small child. And really, my whole peer group. my whole small town would be there. Everyone would be looting that train before somebody would show up to stop us. And so by riding the books, you're able to kind of make your deepest, darkest history into part of public record so that when you do say something stupid, the whole world can call you on it. And that's a nice kind of coaching.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things and I realized I did. My dad worked for the railroad and in the middle of the night when he would get word that a train had derailed anywhere in the West, he would come home, you know, one, two, three o'clock in the morning and he would have us kids all get in the pickup and we would drive for hours across deserts and mountains to wherever this train was smashed up. And our job was to steal as much as we could from the train as possible. And so we would steal typing paper by the reams or we would steal cases and cases of butterscotch pudding. And my mother did not approve of this, but she had read Daphne Demarier's book, Jamaica Inn, which was a huge book in the mid-century. And it depicted what were called the wreckers on the west coast of Ireland, people who would walk up and down beaches with lanterns.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny because the more you have access to the entire sweep of your life and in a way every one of my books is a diary of what I was going through at that point of my life and also kind of a diary of things that my friends were going through. So it's almost like a cross peer group diary of a group of people during that time. Each book is sourced from so many different people. And recently I was watching the news like everybody else and I was watching the looting and just kind of appalled. People stealing stuff, you know, from Sax Fifth Avenue, people stealing stuff from downtown Portland. I mean, downtown Portland is just a giant looting festival. And I remarked the same to some friends. And one of my friends who had read my book, Invisible Monsters, said, you're one to talk. You grew up looting.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who might have been killed for one of these screams. And this is a character I kind of go back to, the father who has killed or lost his child. I find that people engage with it really intensely. And I think I engage with it. I just realized this is a fairly safe revelation. But I don't have kids and I won't have kids. And I think I've reached a point in my life where I'm beginning to really panic and mourn the loss of not having kids. And I can express that through writing a character whose big purpose is to find what became of his dead child or if his child was killed. So without realizing that aspect of myself, but I find that that character resonates with a lot of my peers. who have chosen not to have kids, that character is really hits home for them.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“t shirt for a band called the Wilhelm Scream. And suddenly all these strange coincidences, the Wilhelm scream was coming to me from so many different directions, unrelated directions that I thought, ah, this is all confirmation. This is what I should be working on. And so I would mention it to other people and they told me about the goofy hauler. They told me about the Howie scream. They told me about tape bleed. You know, I meet with so many recording engineers doing radio shows or doing podcasts or doing audiobooks. And they all have some fantastic story. And so, you know, it gave me a way to kind of fish for this information from people who really know it. And then it gave me a structure for assembling it all together and on an emotional level. It's about a guy who is searching for his daughter.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am always fascinated by the commodification of human things. We are so constantly finding ways of buying and selling things that had never been a commodity before. And I had started with the idea of someone who collected human screams and in doing so basically kill people in order to record their ultimate scream. And when I was doing a rough draft of the story, I mentioned it to a friend. And he said, have you heard of the Wilhelm scream? And the Wilhelm scream is a famous scream from the 1940s that's been used in dozens of movies, hundreds of video games, cartoons, television, everything. The Wilhelm scream is everywhere. And at the same time, I was writing it, a cover artist for Fight Club 3 drew a tattoo artist who was wearing a concert.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it is never really as if it's plunged into an abyss because any kind of revelation like that is such a relief. It's gaining access, being able to retrieve something that had been so completely lost to me that I feel a fantastic joy when even those darkest things come to the surface. Yeah, because at least I know what I'm dealing with and I'm no longer used by it. I'm using it. And my advice to writers dangerous writing is that so many of us are used by aspects of our history, our past, our experience without fully understanding them. And once we can unpack them in the seemingly innocuous world of fiction, then we can more fully look at them and be aware of them and not be used by them.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hell no, I'm not going to go there. Now, you know, number one, because it's always so fantastically dark and personal and suppressed. And number two, I'm afraid if I ever get that specific with my intention, it will preclude the reader's sort of interpretation and it won't have any power for the reader because suddenly there'll be this correct interpretation. And if it's the reader doesn't conform to that, then the reader is wrong. And again, it's never about making the reader wrong. It's about making the reader right and giving them a rush of being right over and over.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suddenly, you can realize in the middle of some room full of reporters, the thing, the dark, secret, horrible thing that you were actually writing about. And you can be mortified. You put this thing on the page. And then you spend the whole rest of that meeting with a smile just pinned on your face, praying that no one will ever realize what you were actually writing about. And it's painful, but I would rather it happens eventually than never happen because it's extraordinary to see how your subconscious was working that whole time. And in a way, as you're writing, you are trying to trick yourself to go to a place that you would never consciously go to. And at the same time, you're trying to trick the reader to go to a place that they would never consciously go to and to have a reaction to...”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can only talk about it. I always try to be as specific as possible and address maybe just one aspect of something rather than try to sort of generalize about the entire thing. And one interesting aspect that I've grown to appreciate is that when you do a thousand press junkets for a movie and you're asked the same questions over and over, it's kind of like the whole Buddhist concept of look again, look again, look again. And it's as if you're being psychoanalyzed by a million strangers who have no emotional attachment to your action, to your answer. But you are still looking a little deeper and trying to reinvent the thing every time you look at it. And so often it takes that kind of really thorough coaching before you realize what you actually wrote about.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boy, it was dismal. They sent me on a four city tour, and I never had more than one or two people at any cities. I ended up in Livermore. Livermore, California with no one. And I doubt if it sold 2,000 copies in its first year, hardcover. And even in 1999, when the movie was coming out, most of the hardcovers were still in the warehouse and they were about to be pulped, turned back into recycled paper when someone mentioned that a movie was coming out. So they kept the hardcovers and subsequently sold them all, but it sold tiny numbers, just really nothing numbers. It sold a little better as a paperback. But no, it was a big bomb at the beginning.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had no idea. I was young. I'd never done this before. So I just took the money. But then I made the mistake of repeating what this other author had told me and became part of the public record. And ultimately hurt the feelings of the editor who had acquired the money for me. But that's kind of what it's known is politely it's known as kiss off money.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I have such misgivings about ever having mentioned this because it really hurt my editor's feelings. Years ago, when Fight Club was being shopped around as a manuscript, there was this really brave guy, Jerry Howard, at WW Norton. And Jerry wanted to acquire the book for Norton so bad. And finally he got Norton to offer $6,000 on it, which he brought to me. And I was thrilled. I had no idea that $6,000 was a really small advance. And then years later, I mentioned it to another Norton author. And she said, oh, you accepted the fuck you money. And I said, you know, what's that? And she said, if the house does not want to acquire a book, but they don't want to alienate the editor who wants to acquire the book, they offer an advance so low that the author is supposed to say, fuck you. Walk away”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of liminal events. They tend to have communitas. They're outside of the regular world. They have social leveling of the power hierarchy. But they can occur at any time. They tend to be things that you purchase your way into, like a concert, like Burning Man.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so was Fosching or Mardi Gras that it was traditionally the one time when poor people could go into the church and eat their greasy food and do all these kind of outrageous things. And the clergy did kind of profane things. And it was during Foshing, it was during the period before Lent that Martin Luther nailed up his protests. So that's why Protestant religions have never had power hierarchy reversal rituals. Because that's how they kind of came into power and they don't want to provide that opportunity for something to go wrong again. And extending that to limnoid, limbal events are things that happen at regular junctures in the culture. Christmas funerals, weddings, Halloween before Lent, Easter. But limnoid events are events that have the characteristics”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Door and ask for candy. People would give you candy. And that was basically just a way of saving a huge amount of insurance claims. It started in Canada, in Toronto, but it really, that's what we see as Halloween now. Christmas was kind of the same way that Christmas carolers would go around and caroling was a really menacing thing. Caroling meant either you come out and you give us booze or food or gold or we will break your windows.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That at Halloween, all the people who have no power dress up as outlaws. They dress up as cowboys or they dress up as the dead or they cross dress or they dress as animals. They dress as something outside of the normal. And then they go to people who do have power and property. And they demand tribute from them. The hierarchy is reversed for one night. Halloween used to be just a major shit show. People used to tear down fences. They used to slash tires. They used to really destroy a lot of property until the 1920s when the newspapers got together with the insurance companies and the candy companies and decided to promote Halloween to change the listening like pigeons to change it so that if you went door to”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And liminal events happen throughout our lives. The honeymoon is held up as an archetypal liminal event that it is what divides you from being a single person to being a married person. So you are wedded in front of your community. So your whole community is seeing you wedded. But then you have to leave the community for typically three days that the classic honeymoon is a liminal event where you leave the culture for three days. And when you come back, you are fully recognized as being husband and wife. And you go to someplace that is outside of the culture, you know, a resort, someplace that is not part of your everyday life. There are limnoid events, funerals or limnoid events, weddings, Halloween is a great liminoid event. Another distinction of limnoid events is that they tend to have a power hierarchy reversal in them.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, let's start with the word liminal, which sort of comes from threshold or lintel. It's a line that you pass over from one state of being to the next.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was about nothing but creating these kind of experiential social experiments like Burning Man, like Santa Rampage, and most of which did not work. They just fell down. There were horrible failures, but some of which have become huge celebrated things like the naked bike ride and Santa Rampage and Burning Man.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mutually sort of agreed upon situation like whether it's Burning Man in the desert or it's Occupy Wall Street, but they get together with a sense of communitas where the social hierarchy is flattened. Everyone is equal and they kind of experiment to see if they can come up with a different way of being together, experiment with fashion, they experiment with food, with just how to conduct themselves with each other and how to manage themselves. And they also experiment with their identities. And so people go to Burning Man and they're not who they are in the rest of the world. They're a unique Burning Man person for that one week. And so ideally, if those experiments are successful, they get adopted into the culture and they become the new institutions. And years ago before I started writing, I got wrapped up in the cacophony society.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wouldn't even say cults as much as I would say social models. I'm always fascinated by different social models, the kind of games that people invent for how to conduct their lives, that somebody has created all these rules and everyone has agreed to play by these rules. I find that fascinating because it is an acceptance that it is a consensual sort of behavior mutually agreed upon set of behaviors that are going to define our culture and make it work. One aspect is I love the work of Victor Turner, who is a British sort of cultural anthropologist because he identified like Lewis Hyde all these limnal and limnoid rituals that people do. And one limboid rituals are when people get together in a”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel is better than they could do themselves. And beautifully you was very much about talking about this commodification of the personal and how ultimately that takes away our ability to express anything. And we lose all control. So sometimes I am a little dogmatic.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know if I've done it, it was just to kind of raise an awareness, you know, in my book Beautiful You, which is about sex toys that are so effective that they basically take over the world. The book was started because I was a little appalled seeing the Trojan twister advertised so openly during primetime television. And I thought it was just fascinating that what used to be very personal interpersonal interactions were being so commodified. We don't know how to say we love each other. So there's aisles and aisles of cards that will say it for us. And there's all these recording artists that will express our love for us. And, you know, people are kind of losing all of these really intimate ways of connecting and expressing because they can buy something that they”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Jeffrey Epstein thing has just totally tainted how I see an older man and a younger woman together. And so that's one example of how when the listening changes, it sort of taints everything like pigeons. Another example is the Wizard of Oz. Somebody pointed out that Dorothy gets back home by clicking her heels together. And that's a movie that was released in 1939 when clicking your heels together was a really Nazi thing. So it's a Wizard of Oz actually kind of a white supremacist movie. All this heel clicking, all this, I don't know. Suddenly the optics are really bad on the Wizard of Oz. So it just takes these really small things to shift the perspective.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there's some speculative examples. They're not actual examples, but when you change the listening, how it really kind of skews how people perceive things. Nowadays, whenever I see a middle-aged guy walking down the street with a really pretty little girl, I think, I wonder how they met. I go to that Jeffrey Epstein place instead of seeing a father and a daughter.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not because somebody said fur is evil and through a bloody raccoon at the Devil Wears Prada at Anna Winter. It wasn't because of any kind of political thing. It was because the narrative changed. And it changed in that kind of inadvertent, accidental way. And I think that's what really good writing or really good, any storytelling does.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they decided they really wanted to grow the fur market. So the fur industry decided that they would finance furs so that middle class and even lower class people could buy fur, minks, chinchillas, coats, whatever. They could buy them on installments like it would buy a house or a car and tons of lower class people bought tons of fur. And for a brief moment, the firm market exploded in Italy. But then the rich people saw all the poor people wearing fur and the rich people thought, no, fur is no longer a status indicator. So they dropped fur and the celebrities dropped fur. And suddenly the poor people saw that the rich people didn't wear fur anymore. And the poor people dropped fur. And the Italian fur industry has never really recovered from that.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“then they naturally get people to change without having to browbeat people or legislate change. Another set of odd example, my Italian editor Eduardo told me years ago how the Italian fur industry back in the 90s was doing really well. Fur was very popular with wealthy and celebrity Italians.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it wasn't people protesting. It wasn't people chaining themselves to trees. It wasn't anything like that that saved the beavers. It was the British creating the silk top hat. And silk hats suddenly became the fashion. And something that seems the silliest fashion saved beavers because suddenly nobody wanted old-fashioned beaver hats. They wanted silk top hats. And suddenly beaver had no value whatsoever as a commodity. And so suddenly beavers were left unmolested for 100 years and now beavers are everywhere. And I love that story because people think that the arts don't really create social change. But when they change the narrative, when they just change what people perceive as valuable or high status,”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I've always hated a narrative that tries to dictate social change, and I've always felt that the most effective way that it could generate social change is creating and presenting an alternative that is so attractive that it makes people just readily abandon what they were doing before. And my favorite examples are here in the Pacific Northwest We had this huge problem with beavers. Beavers are choking all the waterways with chewed down trees, that beavers have become a fantastically dense pest. But a hundred years ago, beavers were almost extinct because the Hudson Bay Company had come in and set up all these trapping forts and these ways of buying beaver pelts because Beaver was the fur for hats. Everyone wanted a beaver hat. And so Beaver was being driven to extinction for beaver skin hats.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That people who have studied in a field create their breakthrough or create their masterpiece. The proof of their competence. And so it really was at the age of 33 that I wrote Fight Club. But I very much, I started writing it more or less when I was 31 and finished it at 33. Another interesting aspect of that brain study is that this study show that for the rest of people's lives, no matter how old they get, if you ask them, how old do you feel? Almost everyone will say, you know, I feel like I always feel like I'm 31. That really is a formative. Period between 31 and 33.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just a little aside. Doug Copeland, the guy who wrote Generation X. Is a friend of mine. And reading Generation X was kind of an epiphany for me. It was such a unique, fantastic book. And it was a book I read before I really started to write. But Doug Copeland had told me that he had just read a bunch of brain studies that showed that the last sort of physiological changes in the human brain occur around the age of 31 so that it's at the age of 31 that people for the very first time can combine their experience with their education and create something that is greater than just a sum of the two. So it tends to be between the age of 31 and typically 33.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great story. But if the room erupts with everyone having a different version of that same story, that all starts with, oh my gosh, the same thing happened to me, only bigger, then that's a good story. And so if you take your topic to other people and it resonates with each of them enough that they can sort of tell their experience of it, and they can also tell you whether or not it's already been exploited in commercial culture. They can say, oh, I saw that in a movie. So you're testing whether people engage with it. You are expanding it using other people's experience. And you're also making sure that it wasn't already explored through some other sort of commercial narrative.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you know, I could lie. I would lie. I would lie. And I would say Vaikin, you know Yeah, you know, find me some Vikaden and I'll be a happy camper. But no, that's an artificial sense of safety and security. No, the only time is when I feel like I'm fulfilling some kind of destiny and I feel like I've kind of lost myself and I've become a conduit for something deeper and more important than myself. And so often it puts me into conversation with other people because I tell them what I'm working on and I am so constantly looking for different ways of reinventing skipper seafood over and over in a book. And so I need to take the topic to every single person. And I need to see if it resonates with them. That's what we do at parties is that you go to a party and the story you tell, if it shuts the room down and everyone's quiet, that's not necessarily”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fathers in our culture, and these are, say, military drill sergeants or religious leaders or teachers or coaches are becoming stigmatized and they're no longer kind of revered figures in the culture. You know, blame it on a lot of things, on sexual abuse, on whatever. But all these secondary fathers are disappearing. And they're important for both men and women. So without them, what happens? Street gangs happen. And so I don't think we can complain about street gangs unless the secondary father is available in some other form.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And up to that point, I had looked at Black Street gangs and thought these guys are idiots. You know, it's so destructive, so negative and so, you know, without purpose. And then Joseph Campbell mentioned the secondary father. And he said, what's going on in Black Street gangs is that they're getting the secondary father in terms of being given tasks, being given challenges, being given roles, and being given this opportunity to kind of distinguish themselves and to grow their skills in what are more or less illegal ways, but there's still ways of developing the individual so that the individual will eventually rise out of that gang and live a productive life in some other way. But the problem is that more and more people who used to be the secondary”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boy, the million years ago, I did not have television all through college and then all through the 90s. And someone taped the Joseph Campbell PBS lecture series. Bill”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only every time I'm between a book. I am emotional and reactionary and getting drunk and taking ambient and calling my few friends in the middle of the night and saying, what do you mean by that? And I'm picking fights and I am just totally trashing my life. Somebody will say you're not writing right now, are you? And that's exactly it. Because when I'm writing, all of that negative, all that anxiety goes into the work and my life is so peaceful and so productive. But when I'm not writing, and also when I'm writing, there's this sense. I've talked to other writers who write and musicians. And they say that when you're really deep in a project, there is a sense that you are so protected and so embraced by something that nothing bad can happen to you. You really feel like you're...”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spirit that will destroy you and destroy your home. And how many of us kind of know a creative person who just didn't follow through with it and ended up drinking and doing drugs and kind of just destroying their lives because they didn't have the whatever to really pursue the passion that should have been their destiny. But Lewis Hyde writes about that very effectively.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On or their genie. Lewis Hyde's example is the elves and the shoemaker that when the shoemaker is really at a low ebb, the elves Arrive and begin to make these fantastic shoes for him. And when the shoemaker finally gives a gift to them, then they're freed from their bondage and they leave his life, but they leave his life transformed. And according to this ancient Greek and Roman idea, is that if you fulfill your potential, if you sacrifice and you develop your skills that are kind of your destiny according to this potential you're born with, then you free that guardian spirit so that that guardian spirit can move on to another level. In effect, you are freeing the genie from the bottle. And if you do it wrong, the genie has to go back into the bottle. And according to the Greeks and the Romans, if you did it wrong, then the genie, the daemon, the genius becomes a malevolent house.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Without breaking off any piece of it and without leaving any of it sort of obscured with dirt. And the more you understand about this ancient thing, the better you are at reproducing it in its fullness. And so Lewis Hyde helps with that. Boy, the other aspect of Lewis Hyde that I'm really fascinated with is in his book The Gift. He writes a great deal about how According to Greek and Roman tradition, Each of us is born with effectively a guardian angel, but it's more along the lines of a guide that represents our fullest potential. And this guide wants to see us reach our fullest potential, our greatest form of power. And the ancient Greeks and the Romans, they would make a sacrifice on their birthday to this, whether they called it their genius or their daemon.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pen and Rachel, or I'll tell people that you stuck something else in Rachel. And the story works so well. It escalates this completely horrific no-win situation. And when I was done with it, I realized I was rewriting Isaac and Abraham. It's God saying, prove how much you love me by stabbing a knife in your kid. with Lewis Hyde, He helps you identify the archetype that you're writing to so that you can really fulfill that expectation. Because if you get that expectation a tiny bit wrong, then on some level, the reader is not going to be really satisfied with it. Stephen King has written about how when you're writing in a way you're excavating some ancient enormous buried thing and you're trying to excavate it as intactly as possible.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wrote a short story called Phoenix, which was about a woman on a business trip. And she kept on calling home, and her small daughter would not speak to her. And she kept on trying to get her husband to coerce her daughter into saying hi because she had started to fantasize that perhaps her daughter might be ill or in the hospital or might have even been killed and that the husband, the father, does not want to admit that to her over the phone. So it all escalates until she tells her husband, okay, you get a pin from my sewing basket and you stick it in our daughter. You stick it in Rachel and you make Rachel scream. If I don't hear Rachel scream, I'm calling the police and they're going to be at the house and I'm going to tell them that you sexually abused Rachel and you're going to prison. So either you stick a”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there's so much suicide that has been so useful for me because he approaches things from cross-culturally. And so you don't just hear about North American trickster culture with coyote or raven. You hear about Loki, North American trickster culture. You hear about Mediterranean trickster culture. You hear all these, how all these cultures have this kind of chaos character, which is what I was writing when I was writing Tyler Durden. And so seeing how your character falls into this ancient tradition of these archetypes is so important because it allows you to really, you know, write accurately and effectively exactly the character that you're writing and get the effect that you're going for. You realize you're not kind of inventing something entirely new. You're reinventing something really ancient. And there's a wonderful joy in that.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And going back to the short story Guts, the character is so sure that some kind of a snake has come out of the bottom of their pool and this snake has a hold of him. The audience realizes what the snake is before the narrator does. And that forces the audience to have this enormous cognitive reframing and to face the horror all alone without being told what the horror is. In a way, we kind of figure out what's in the box at the end of seven before Brad's hit. And that makes us smarter and more horrified. And we're forced to carry the horror before Brad Pitt is allowed the horror.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really love to tell people that Sylvia Plath was a racist. She really was. She was totally a racist because she wrote the bell curve. No, she wrote the bell jar. And everybody at the party will look at you puzzled for a moment and then go, no, you're such an idiot. She wrote the bell jar. And I'm like, what? And so it's just terrific to troll people like that. It validates their education the way that game shows when you're sitting and you're yelling at jeopardy and you get it right and they get it wrong you feel so pompous and it's always about making the audience giving the audience a win giving the audience an ongoing series of wins and that's a big thing in minimalism is that you never want to tell them what is what until they figure it out first”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So smart, and they get such a rush when you allow people to be smart like that. It's like they've won a game show and they might feel a little less respectful of you. But what's important is that you've made them feel really good. They've got those chemicals going at that point. And you can really start to jerk them around.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sympathy and nurturing that the audience feels for a character who is making a constant mistake. Also, I love doing this. I love going to a literary party and saying, you know, Robert Benchley, what a fantastic career that man has. He founded the New Yorker and then so much later in life, he wrote the book Jaws. And wow, what a fantastic span of a career. And there'll be a long silence and all these smart people look at me. And then finally, if someone will say, no, Peter Benchley wrote Jaws, and that was Robert Benchley's son. And they'll all feel so superior.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She says war, war, war. All this talk of war is spoiling all the barbecues. There is not going to be a war. And as soon as she says, there is not going to be a war, we are on board. We are thinking, you poor privileged little thing. There is going to be a war and it is going to completely kick your ass and it is going to destroy your little world. But because she said the wrong thing, she makes the audience smarter and she makes the audience sympathetic with her. And Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary's baby We know that she's been knocked up by the devil, but she doesn't know. And the fact that she doesn't know makes us really root for her. So when you have a character who's making an ongoing mistake, you keep the audience really engaged because the audience feels superior, doesn't resent the character, and wants to see the character come to enlightenment. But there is a kind of content.”
2020-09-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT