Klosterman Quotes

Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me? ~ Chuck Klosterman

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. ~ Chuck Klosterman

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths. ~ Chuck Klosterman

What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell's murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.) But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other. The possibility that one's life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who's nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great -- a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable-- any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.) If you know ~ Chuck Klosterman

That's like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Sure there's a percentage of people who are like, "It snowed in May. I don't believe in climate change." Well, that's crazy, but that's always gonna be the case. I suppose if climate change happens much faster than even the dire experts predict, then I suppose opinions will change. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Perry wanted to be the villain, probably for strategic reasons. But it didn't take. He wasn't smart enough; he probably didn't even know how "Ayn" was pronounced. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not- even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian- it's only a matter of time. ~ Chuck Klosterman

We understand a person with problems, someone who is wrong about a lot of things in his or her life, who makes messes. We don't understand someone who is constantly right, who is only felled by Kryptonite. Chuck Klosterman had a pretty great book about this whole thing - I Wear The Black Hat - that came out last year and which I greatly enjoyed. ~ Tod Goldberg

A lot of that, "Have you ever noticed that [specific Florida player] is like the [dated cultural reference] version of [obscure player from the middle 1980s] except that his [some ridiculous stoner concept about grizzly bears] has been filtered through the political ideology of [random indie artist currently on tour with Built to Spill]?" We all have to pay the rent, rockers. I know who I am. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class. ~ Chuck Klosterman

To me, fear of the future means fear of technology. I have a little bit of that. I still use it, but I kind of see technology as this harmful thing that's so ingrained in my life that it sort of dictates and controls my relationship with it. ~ Chuck Klosterman

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I hate motorcycles. Because if I hit one, even if it's not my fault, if I've done nothing wrong, I'm not charged with manslaughter, he's gonna die, because he's on a motorcycle. So I have to live my life knowing that I killed this guy. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool. ~ Chuck Klosterman

But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're
sharing a reality that doesn't exist. ~ Chuck Klosterman

It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine - something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game's violence would save it, and it would never go away. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I keep saying the word 'weird' over and over again, but it's the only way I can describe it. ~ Chuck Klosterman

His lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Unless you're Shannon Hoon (of Blind Melon), dying is the only thing that guarantees a rock star will have a legacy that stretches beyond temporary relevance. ~ Chuck Klosterman

But I still feel like I lost.
We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in the sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet. probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real-but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet first time you really, really want to love someo ~ Chuck Klosterman

So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds - one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden - takes on an entirely new meaning. ~ Chuck Klosterman

There's this belief that some things can be taken seriously in an intellectual way, while some things are only entertainment or only a commodity. Or there's some kind of critical consensus that some things are "good," and some things are garbage, throwaway culture. And I think the difference between them, in a lot of ways, is actually much less than people think. Especially when you get down to how they affect the audience. ~ Chuck Klosterman

What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hair
I needed long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical. I wanted to rock. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I almost never get lonely. I love being alone. I'm glad I'm married, and I love my wife. But there's never been a situation in my life where my unhappiness was based on loneliness. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation. ~ Chuck Klosterman

There was a time in our very recent history when it was "interesting" to be a Star Wars fan. It was sort of like admitting you masturbate twice a day or that your favorite band was They Might Be Giants. Star Wars was something everyone of a certain age secretly loved but never openly recognized ~ Chuck Klosterman

When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore? ~ Chuck Klosterman

It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box office star in America, because every straight girl I know would see her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker. ~ Chuck Klosterman

If somebody asked for the first draft of something I'd written, it'd probably be pretty close to whatever got published. I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Punk was perfect for lazy people, because anyone could do it
you didn't even need to know how to play your instrument, assuming you knew how to plug it in. There was really no difference between Sid Vicious and anyone in London who owned a bass. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The thing that has always baffled me about people's perception of my writing is the sense that I'm a very controversial, opinionated, polarizing person. I feel like I write about things that I'm interested in, and I describe why they're interesting to me. I could be negative, I guess. It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. ~ Chuck Klosterman

If you move furniture all day, if you're a construction worker, if you have a job that's real physical, this idea that there is a sport that involves the kind of conventional, traditional view of toughness, you see that still as a positive thing. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. ~ Chuck Klosterman

If Elvis ..is the definition of rock, then rock is remembered as showbiz ... It becomes a solely performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes personality music ... if Dylan ... becomes the definition of rock, everything reverses. In this contingency, lyrical authenticity becomes everything: Rock is galvanized as an intellectual craft, interlocked with the folk tradition ... The fact that Dylan does not have a conventionally "good" singing voice becomes retrospective proof that rock audiences prioritized substance over style ... ~ Chuck Klosterman

I think one possibility [in the future] might be chemotherapy. And I'm always hesitant to say that because it makes it sound like I'm against chemotherapy. Right now, chemotherapy is the best cancer treatment therapy we have. But let's say we find some way where we can almost genetically engineer the DNA of our being and fight cancer that way. Then, the idea that we used to pump poison into people to fight off cancer will almost seem like the use of leeches or something. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you're good seems like a zero-sum game; I'm not even sure those actions would still qualify as 'good,' since they'd merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in--a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, or whatever--one has to assume that you can't be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I'm certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It's not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they're not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more 'diabolical' in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stali ~ Chuck Klosterman

And when they finally demanded that I had to stop keeping score and that I needed to play every future contest as an exhibition, I casually made the kind of statement sixteen-year-olds should not make to forty-six-year-old Midwestern housewives: "Why are you telling me how to do my job?" I asked. "It's not like I show up in your kitchen and tell you when to bake cookies. ~ Chuck Klosterman

This is the difference between the fox and the hedgehog. Both creatures know that storytelling is everything, and that the only way modern people can understand history and politics is through the machinations of a story. But only the hedgehog knows that storytelling is secretly the problem, which is why the fox is constantly wrong. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality ~ Chuck Klosterman

There is no alternative universe where Ralph Sampson is a beloved symbol of excellence. There's no Philip K. Dick novel where he averages a career double-double and gets four rings. He could never be that guy. He was needed elsewhere, for other reasons. He was needed to remind people that their own self-imposed mediocrity is better than choking on transcendence. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting. ~ Chuck Klosterman

If I'm around spiders, my fear isn't so much the spider, but my fear is that I'm somewhere rustic and that spiders are crawling around. I must be in the woods. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It's so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn't dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They'd all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn't even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend - movies can't show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people. ~ Chuck Klosterman

When I think about the future, I'm not necessarily arguing it's going to be better or worse. I'm just saying it's going to be different. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I'm really an alarmist when it comes to epidemics. Swine flu now; when SARS was big, I was all freaked out about that, bird flu. That terrifies me. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Cars are the most central thing in America, in a lot of ways. They've probably influenced the way we live more than anything else, and yet every really big problem - whether it's the environment or who dictates the international economy because of oil - is all tied to cars. Ultimately, cars are bad for civilization. I don't know if they'll end us. ~ Chuck Klosterman

If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the "form of funny," which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness. ~ Chuck Klosterman

We all convince ourselves of things like this- not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time. ~ Chuck Klosterman

We are remembered for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure. It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how often that rightness is
validated by others. We are what we cannot do. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Take George W. Bush: He was an unpopular two-term president. Three times, his approval rating dropped to 25 percent. [To be fair, he also had the highest approval rating of all time, very briefly. But that was immediately after 9/11  -  and in the wake of domestic terrorism, a well-dressed mannequin's approval rating might have hovered around 50.] During his last two years in office, he was hammered nonstop, periodically classified as the worst U.S. president since Ulysses Grant or James Buchanan. Yet was Bush a villain? No. He was not. He was never, ever calculating. He didn't know the most (which is not to say he was dumb), and he didn't care the least (which is not to say he was a paragon of empathy). He was just the guy who ended up with the job. The villain of his administration ended up being Vice President Dick Cheney, a frosty puppet master who radically expanded the powers of the presidency even though he was not the president. ~ Chuck Klosterman

...but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along. ~ Chuck Klosterman

It"s easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing with a monster. ~ Chuck Klosterman

If you're doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you're not going to have a relationship with them, they're not going to like you, they're not going to be your friend. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The defining line from Frank Herbert's Dune argues that the mystery of life "is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced." My fantasy offers the opposite. Nothing would be experienced. Nothing would feel new or unknown or jarring. It's a fantasy for people who want to solve life's mysteries without having to do the work. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I do not know how much money Britney Spears earned last year.. However, I do know that it's not enough for me to want her life, were I given the option to have it. Every day, random people use Britney's existence as currency; they talk about her public failures and her lack of talent as a way to fill the emptiness of their own normalcy. She - alone with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and all those androids from The Hills - are the unifying entities within this meta era. In a splintered society, they are the means through which people devoid of creativity communicate with each other. THey allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; they allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider. A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity and the rights to her own persona, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money. But she still doesn't earn a fraction of what she warrants in free-trade economy. If Britney Spears were paid $1 every time a self-loathing stranger used her as a surrogate for his own failure, she would out earn Warren Buffet in three months. This is why entertainers (and athletes) make so much revenue but are still wildly underpaid: We use them for things that are worth more than money. It's a new kind of dehumanizing slavery - not as awful as the literal variety, but dehumanizing nonetheless. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least. ~ Chuck Klosterman

People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation. ~ Chuck Klosterman

When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the 'presidential greatness poll' in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The amount of response I get, in both a negative and a positive context, is completely related to the amount of books I sell, I think. It seems to have nothing to do with what I'm writing, but what degree of success I'm perceived to have. It's really weird, especially since I spent so much of my life covering people who are famous. It's interesting to actually have it happen to me on some level. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people3 want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The most popular single in the world was "Livin' la Vida Loca," a song about how Pro Tools made Puerto Ricans gay. ~ Chuck Klosterman

An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the twenty-first century: "The biggest problem in my life," he said, "is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine. ~ Chuck Klosterman

A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story. ~ Chuck Klosterman

You want to know what I really learned? I learned that people don't consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from. I saw a lot of wine-drinking, a lot of compulsive drug use, a lot of sleeping with the television on. It was less festive than I anticipated. My view had always been that I was my most alive when I was totally alone, because that was the only time I could live without fear of how my actions were being scrutinized and interpreted. What I came to realize is that people need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they're doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don't count. This, I think, explains the fundamental urge to get married and have kids[…]. We're self-conditioned to require an audience, even if we're not doing anything valuable or interesting. I'm sure this started in the 1970s. I know it did. I think Americans started raising offspring with this implicit notion that they had to tell their children, "You're amazing, you can do anything you want, you're a special person." [...] But - when you really think about it - that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks, "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how th ~ Chuck Klosterman

Let's say Twitter existed during the Civil War. We would have a better understanding of people in the Confederacy who were against slavery, people in the North who actually felt we should just let the South be the South. Because the way it is now, it seems like we have this portrait where everybody in Georgia hated Yankees and everybody in the North was enlightened. That wouldn't seem as clear cut as it does now. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Internet porn makes everything more reasonable
once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The Disco Group ABBA": They were beards and teeth and natural breasts and whiteness. I ~ Chuck Klosterman

Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself. ~ Chuck Klosterman

It feels so exhausting to be so bad at something I loved so much. ~ Chuck Klosterman

If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch. ~ Chuck Klosterman

And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The stark, pedestrian images used by filmmakers (probably out of financial necessity) expressed nothing, symbolically or metaphorically. The only purpose they served was to remind me that a huge chunk of my life is completely over, even though I will probably live 60 more years. There are so many things that will never happen to me again, and I never even noticed when those things stopped occurring. And this does not mean I wish I had my old life back, because I like my new life better; I was just shocked to discover how much of what used to be central to my existence doesn't even matter to me anymore. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Is there anything more attractive than a polite person with limitless self-belief? There is not. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Metaphoric sheep get no love. There's no worse thing to be compared to, at least among conspiracy theorists. "You're just a sheep," they will say. "You believe what they want you to believe." But this implies that they - the metaphoric shepherds - have something they want you to accept. It implies that these world-altering shepherds are consciously leading their sheeple to a conclusion that plays to their benefit. No one considers the possibility of a shepherd just aimlessly walking around the meadow, pointing his staff in whatever direction he happens to be facing. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means
it means the movie has an unhappy ending. ~ Chuck Klosterman

By now, everyone I know is one of seven strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Read World is the real world is The Real World is the read world. It's the same true story, even when it isn't. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I cannot imagine the type of sinister fiend who would be against the library. A library essentially says, 'Look, here is some free information that will enrich your life. Read it on your own time. I trust that you will bring it back when you are finished.' It might be the most civilized, forward-thinking institution in America. Perhaps the only one, in fact. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don't really "need" anything new, so we only create what we want. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books, or write opinion pieces about what they think of Neil Young, or why they quit watching ER or whatever. And because of that, I think there's a lot of people who write about my books with the premise of, "Why this guy? Why not me?" ~ Chuck Klosterman

The Three Little Pigs" is not the story that is fucking people up. Stories like "Say Anything" are fucking people up. We don't need to worry about people unconsciously "absorbing" archaic secret messages when they're six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when they're twenty-six. They're the ones that get us, because they're the ones we try to turn into life. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Everything said about Gen Xers
both positive and negative
was completely true. Twenty-somethings in the nineties rejected the traditional working-class American lifestyle because (a) they were smart enough to realize those values were unsatisfying, and (b) they were totally fucking lazy. Twenty-somethings in the nineties embraced a record like Nirvana's Nevermind because (a) it was a sociocultural affront to the vapidity of the Reagan-era paradigm, and (b) it fucking rocked. Twenty-somethings in the nineties were by and large depressed about the future, mostly because (a) they knew there was very little to look forward to, and (b) they were obsessed with staring into the eyes of their own self-absorbed sadness. There are no myths about Generation X. It's all true. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I've been asked about this constantly, and I compare it to how if you're walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and vomits on you: You wouldn't be hurt by that, you'd just think it's weird. ~ Chuck Klosterman

We must start from the premise that - in all likelihood - we are already wrong. And not "wrong" in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves. ~ Chuck Klosterman

If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of a different color, or women, please do this one favor for us - leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The deeper reality is that I'm not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I'm certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel? ... There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There's probably a third level, too - how I want to think I feel. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The desire to be cool is - ultimately - the desire to be rescued. ~ Chuck Klosterman

It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying. ~ Chuck Klosterman

When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago
and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail
it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Life is fucking confusing. I don't know anything, and neither do you. ~ Chuck Klosterman

History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining. ~ Chuck Klosterman