Chuck Palahniuk
(February 21, 1962)

Palahniuk began writing fiction in his thirties while attending writer’s workshops, hosted by Tom Spanbauer, who inspired Palahniuk’s minimalistic writing style. His initial works were rejected publication mostly because of the amount of disturbing content. However, Palahniuk managed to get one of his short stories published in a compilation in 1995.The story later became an inspiration and evolved into Palahniuk’s most famous novel, Fight Club. While the short story had a difficult time finding a publisher, its conversion into a novel experienced the opposite. Fight club was accepted and published in 1996. For his exceptional writing in Fight club, Palahniuk was presented the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award as well as the Oregon Book Award for Best Novel in 1997.

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
— Diary

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
— Invisible Monsters

“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”
― Fight Club

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Invisible Monsters

“What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.”
― Choke

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
― Invisible Monsters

“You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
― Fight Club

“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.”
― Monsters

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
― Invisible Monsters

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”
― Fight Club

“Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.”
― Invisible Monsters

“We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”
― Invisible Monsters

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

“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.”
― Survivor

“I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. I am Jack's Broken Heart.”
― Fight Club

“More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.”
― Asfixia

“The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.”
― Invisible Monsters

“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.”
― Invisible Monsters