Chuck Palahniuk
Written in stolen moments under truck chassis and on park benches to a soundtrack of The Downward Spiral and Pablo Honey, Fight Club came into existence. The adaptation of Fight Club was a flop at the box office, but achieved cult status on DVD. The film’s popularity drove sales of the novel. Chuck put out two novels in 1999, Survivor and Invisible Monsters. Choke, published in 2001, became Chuck’s first New York Times bestseller. Chuck’s work has always been infused with personal experience, and his next novel, Lullaby, was no exception. Chuck credits writing Lullaby with helping him cope with the tragic death of his father. Diary and the non-fiction guide to Portland, Fugitives and Refugees, were released in 2003. While on the road in support of Diary, Chuck began reading a short story entitled 'Guts,' which would eventually become part of the novel Haunted.
In the years that followed, he continued to write, publishing the bestselling Rant, Snuff, Pygmy, Tell-All, a 'remix' of Invisible Monsters, Damned, and most recently, Doomed.
Chuck also enjoys giving back to his fans, and teaching the art of storytelling has been an important part of that. In 2004, Chuck began submitting essays to ChuckPalahniuk.net on the craft of writing. These were 'How To' pieces, straight out of Chuck's personal bag of tricks, based on the tenants of minimalism he learned from Tom Spanbauer. Every month, a “Homework Assignment” would accompany the lesson, so Workshop members could apply what they had learned. (all 36 of these essays can currently be found on The Cult's sister-site, LitReactor.com).
Then, in 2009, Chuck increased his involvement by committing to read and review a selection of fan-written stories each month. The best stories are currently set to be published in Burnt Tongues, a forthcoming anthology, with an introduction written by Chuck himself.
His next novel, Beautiful You, is due out in October 2014.
“She says that the problem with passive people is that they force you to take action. After that, they hate you for it. They never forgive you.”
“Cahillik bir zamanlar sonsuz mutluluktu.”
“Denny, ‘Çocuk doğurmak için izin alman gerekmiyor. Öyleyse niye ev yapman için izin alman gereksin ki?’ diye soruyor.‘Peki ya tehlikeli ve çirkin bir ev yaparsan?’ diye soruyorum.Denny, “Peki ya tehlikeli ve göt gibi bir evlat yetiştirirsen?” diyor.”
“I embrace my own festering diseased corruption,”
“That old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways. And it does work both ways.”
“All I want is somebody to ask me what happened. Then, I’ll get on with my life.”
“With the elevator stopped between floors, my view is about a cockroach above the green linoleum, and from here at cockroach level the green corridor stretches toward the vanishing point, past half-open doors where titans and their gigantic wives drink barrels of champagne and bellow to each other wearing diamonds bigger than I feel.”
“The first step to eternal life is You have to die!!”
“Kalbime bir bıçak saplanmış gibi hissediyordum ve başımdan geçen tüm olaylara rağmen hâlâ incitilmek için sonsuz ve engellenemez bir potansiyelim olduğunu keşfetmiştim.”
“Tyler, I'm grateful to you; for everything that you've done for me. But this is too much. I don't want this.What do you want? Wanna go back to the shit job, fuckin' condo world, watching sitcoms? Fuck you, I won't do it.”
“There is no human soul, and I am absolutely for sure seriously not going to fucking cry.”
“Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry...”
“When you go out with a drunk, you’ll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you’re drinking, drinking is okay. Two’s company. Drinking is fun. If there’s a bottle, even if your glass isn’t empty, a drunk, he’ll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own. This only looks like generosity.”
“We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
“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.”
“Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.”
“Stick and stones may break your bones and words can kill you too”
“Conditions change and we mutate.”
“Nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.”
“Something or someone lived or died so you could have this life.The mountain of the dead. They left you into the daylight.”
“As human beings, our first commandment is:Something needs to happen”
“The skeleton is just a way to keep your tissue off the floor.”
“It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.”
“Ištisos kartos užsiima darbais, kurių nekenčia, tik todėl, kad nusipirktų, ko jiems iš tikrųjų nereikia.”
“Quit trying to fix your life. Deal with your one big issue.”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Adam says. “You’re still the eight-year-old sitting in school, sitting in church, believing everything you’re told. You remember pictures in books. They planned how you’d live your whole life. You’re still asleep.”
“Everything you remember is wrong.”
“The whole world is a disaster waiting to happen.”
“You don’t have to control everything,” she says. “You can’t control everything.”
“Can you just relax and let things happen?”
“No matter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.”
“I wonder if running is just another fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a problem I can’t remember.”
“I have no idea where they’re going with this.”
“My hands are numb. I can’t feel my face. My tongue belongs to somebody else.”
“Don’t ask me when because I don’t remember, but somewhere along the way I keep forgetting to commit suicide.”
“This is being loved without the risk of loving anyone in return.”
“People are looking for how to put everything together. They need a unified field theory that combines glamour and holiness, fashion and spirituality. People need to reconcile being good and being good-looking.”
“As if any one of those people isn’t already looking around for a new guru to make sense out of their risk-free boredom of a lifestyle while they watch the news on television and pass judgment on me.”
“It was just one more predictable mass suicide in a world filled with splinter groups that limp along until they’re confronted.”
“The truth is nothing new ever happens.”
“According to the agent, the secret to getting famous is you just keep saying yes.”
“Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.”
“Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it’s all because we’re afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt.”
“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
“You realize that there’s no point in doing anything if nobody’s watching.”
“Everyone else I could call is dead.”
“The fish is something to make me settle in one place. According to church colony doctrine, it’s why men marry women and why women have children. It’s something to live your life around.”
“Just something to need you home at night. Something to keep you from living alone.”
“It's time to keep living. It's time to reenlist.”
“Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.”