Diary - Chuck Palahniuk

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness.

You’ll need to suffer to make any real art.

If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.

Plato said: ‘He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.’

Who knows where an idea comes from. Our inspiration. Why do we imagine what we imagine.

According to her, beauty was a stale concept. Superficial. A cheat.

...if you see how anything you could paint would just be adding more mediocre shit to a world already crammed with mediocre shit.

Anytime some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you’re a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink. That’s the Misty Wilmot Drinking Game.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Just for the record, today’s weather is nervous disgust with tentative apprehension.

Still, the better she could draw, the worse her life got—until nothing in her real world was good enough. It got until she didn’t belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. Not the boys in high school. Not the other girls. Nothing was as real as her imagined world.

If you’re reading this, welcome back to reality. This is where all that glorious, unlimited potential of your youth has led. All that unfulfilled promise. Here’s what you’ve done with your life.
Your name is Peter Wilmot.
All you need to understand is you turned out to be one sorry sack of shit.

The way cables pull aside a theater curtain, your every smile is an opening night. A premiere. You unveiling yourself.

Did you know it takes a fire of at least sixteen-hundred degrees lasting seven hours to consume the average human body?