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Other authors named Chuck:
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Author's popularity: 5
Vote:  
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If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
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Popularity: 2
Vote: | A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified? |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Every woman is just a different kind of problem. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Find out what you're afraid of and go live there. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some bline, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total suprise. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person? |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Masochism is a valuable job skill. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | My father always said, "Get married before the sex gets boring or you'll never get married." |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The answer is there is no answer. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we cant decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables. There is only the inevitable. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | What we don't understand we can make mean anything. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels? |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you. All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog. People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden. People need somebody they can send a check at Christmas. So stay poor. "Charity" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. |
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Biography
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Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk (born February 21 1961 in Pasco, Washington, USA) is an American satirical novelist and freelance journalist living in Portland, Oregon. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher. He has one of the largest centralized followings of any author on the Internet, based around his official web site. His writings, similar in style to those of such peers as Bret Easton Ellis, Irvine Welsh, and Douglas Coupland, have made him one of the most popular novelists of Generation X.
Biography Palahniuk (pronounced PAUL-ah-nik or Pôlənĭk) is the son of Carol and Fred Palahniuk, and grew up living in a static caravan in Burbank, Washington with his family. His parents later separated and divorced, often leaving him and his three siblings to live with their grandparents at their cattle ranch in eastern Washington.
In his twenties, Palahniuk attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, graduating in 1986. While attending college, he worked as an intern for National Public Radio's KLCC in Eugene, Oregon. He moved to Portland soon afterwards. After writing for the local newspaper for a short while, he began working for Freightliner as a diesel mechanic, continuing in that job until his writing career took off. During that time, he also wrote manuals on fixing trucks and had a short stint as a journalist (a job he didn't return to until after he became a successful novelist). After casually attending an Erhard Seminars Training seminar held by an organization called the Landmark Forum, Palahniuk quit his job as a journalist. Wanting to do more with his life than just his job, Palahniuk did volunteer work for a homeless shelter. Later, he also volunteered at a hospice as an escort; he provided transportation for terminally-ill people and brought them to support group meetings. He ceased volunteering upon the death of a patient to whom he had grown attached. (Palahniuk, p.195-199)
Palahniuk would also become a member of the rebellious Cacophony Society in his adulthood. He is a regular participant in their events, including the annual Santa Rampage (a public Christmas party involving pranks and drunkenness) in Portland. His participation in the Society inspired some of the events in his writings, both fictional and non-fictional. Most notably, he used the Cacophony Society as the basis for Project Mayhem in Fight Club.
Palahniuk began writing fiction in his mid-thirties. By his recount, he started writing while attending writer's workshops, hosted by Tom Spanbauer, which he attended to meet new friends. Spanbauer largely inspired Palahniuk's minimalistic writing style. His first book, Insomnia: If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Already, was never published due to his disappointment with the story (though a small part of it would be salvaged for use in Fight Club). When he attempted to publish his next novel, Invisible Monsters, publishers rejected it for being too disturbing. This led him to work on his most famous novel, Fight Club, which he wrote as an attempt to disturb the publisher even more for rejecting him. Palahniuk wrote this story in his spare time while working for Freightliner. After initially publishing it as a short story in the compilation Pursuit of Happiness (which would become chapter 6 of the novel), Palahniuk expanded it into a full novel, which – contrary to his expectations – the publisher was willing to publish. While the original hardcover edition of the book received positive reviews and some awards, it had a short shelf life. Nevertheless, the book made its way to Hollywood, where interest in adapting it to film was growing. The film was eventually completed in 1999 by director David Fincher. The film was a box office disappointment (although it was #1 at the U.S. box office in its first weekend) and critical reaction was mixed, but a cult following soon emerged as the DVD of the film was popular upon release. Two paperback re-releases of the novel, one in 1999 and the other in 2004, were later made (the latter of which contains a new introduction by the author about the success of the film adaptation).
While not all fans of the film realized that it was based on a novel, many fans did, and a fan base for the author's work soon began to form. A revised version of Invisible Monsters, as well as his fourth novel, Survivor, were also published that year, allowing Palahniuk to become a cult figure himself. A few years later Palahniuk managed to make his first New York Times bestseller, the novel Choke. From then on, Palahniuk's later books would often meet with similar success. Such success has allowed him to go on book tours to promote his books, where he reads from both new and upcoming works.
The year 1999 affected Palahniuk's later writings. At that time, his father Fred Palahniuk had started dating a woman named Donna Fontaine. Fontaine had recently put her ex-boyfriend Dale Shackleford in prison for sexual abuse. Shackleford had vowed to kill Fontaine as soon as he was released from prison. After his release, Shackleford followed Fontaine and the senior Palahniuk to Fontaine's home in Kendrick, Idaho after they had gone out for a date. Shackleford then shot them both and dragged their bodies into Fontaine's cabin home, which he set on fire immediately afterwards. In the spring of 2001, Shackleford was found guilty for two counts of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death. In the wake of these events, Palahniuk began working on the novel Lullaby. According to him, he wrote the novel to help him cope with having helped decide to have Shackleford get the death sentence.
In September 2003, Palahniuk was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly's Karen Valby. During the interview, Palahniuk confidentially mentioned information pertaining to his spouse. While it had been previously believed by many that he was married to a woman (some members of the press had claimed he had a wife), Palahniuk had in fact been living with his boyfriend. Some time later, Palahniuk believed that Valby was going to print this information in her article, without his consent. In response, he put an angry audio recording of himself on his web site, not only revealing that he is gay, but also making negative comments about Valby and a member of her family. However, Palahniuk's fears turned out to be ungrounded, and Valby's article did not reveal anything about his personal life outside of the fact that he is unmarried. The recording was later removed from the web site, making some fans believe that Palahniuk is embarrassed of his homosexuality. According to Dennis Widmyer, the site's webmaster, the recording was not removed because of the statements regarding his sexuality, but because of the statements about Valby. Palahniuk would later post a new recording to his site, asking his fans not to overreact to these events. He also apologized for his behavior, claiming that he wished he had not recorded the message.
While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary, Palahniuk read to his audiences a short story titled Guts, a tale of accidents involving masturbation which appears in his book Haunted. It was reported that over 35 people fainted while listening to the readings (although it is possible that many of these incidents were staged by Palahniuk's fans for humorous effect). Playboy magazine would later publish the story in their March 2004 issue; Palahniuk offered to let them publish another story along with it, but the publishers found the second work too disturbing. On his tour to promote Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories in the summer of 2004, he read the story to audiences again, bringing the total amount of fainters up to 53, and later up to 60, while on tour to promote the softcover edition of Diary. The last fainting occurred on 25 September 2004, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Palahniuk is apparently not bothered by these incidents, which have not stopped fans from reading "Guts" or his other works.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Chuck Palahniuk".
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