bevinator: 18 Strength, 18 Dex, 16 Con. The rest of the stats are irrelevant.
For equipment, you'll be wanting to use the Scarlet Ninja-to +3 for the early stages, since it gives you an extra attack and its damage is much better than your fists for quite some time. You can buy it from Joluv in the Copper Coronet. Get as much AC-boosting stuff as you can get, and use an Ioun stone or King Strom's Mask for a helmet. In late-game, your fists are all you need.
Quivering Palm is, unfortunately, not that useful for most of the things you'd want to use it on. They're generally either immune to instant-death entirely, or they've got good enough saves vs. spells that they don't care. There's no save penalty for Quivering Palm, it doesn't deal extra damage or anything, and you still have to succeed on a melee attack, so it's substantially less useful than, say, Finger of Death. It is, however, useful for quickly getting rid of lower-level creatures with lots of health but poor saves... but once you get Whirlwind Attack or Deathblow, you'll probably never use it again.
Monks are pretty powerful and don't suffer from many of the issues in BG that they encounter in other forms of D&D, but IMO they tend to get a little boring after a while.
EDIT: The Gauntlets of Crushing, which are amazing for monks, can only be acquired by supporting the Sahuagin King and killing the Prince. They can't be pickpocketed or looted from any corpse; you only get them through dialog.
Thanks for the advice man, yeah I will try this build in a new game very helpful.
Monks do seem like alot of fun to use, reminds me of the Diablo 1 expansion Hellfire which added them as well.