Chuck Klosterman Quotes & Sayings

According to the director, Primer is a movie about the relationship between risk and trust. This is true. But it also makes a concrete point about the potential purpose of time travel - it's too important to use only for money, but too dangerous to use for anything else. — 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

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names. — Chuck Klosterman

The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll. — Chuck Klosterman

But I've mellowed over time, which is what all wine drunks and dope smokers say when trying to justify why they quit trying. — Chuck Klosterman

You're trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview. — Chuck Klosterman

A whole bunch of months passed and I didn't hear anything and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age. — Chuck Klosterman

It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything. If I could, I'd completely rewrite Fargo Rock City, and every sentence would be just slightly different. In all likelihood, most of them wouldn't be any better. Some of them would just be changed back to whatever form they used to be, before I second-guessed myself the first time. — Chuck Klosterman

We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live. — Chuck Klosterman

Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water). — Chuck Klosterman

Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture. — Chuck Klosterman

Texting has become my favorite way to communicate. I feel like many of my relationships are based in this, because in a sense it feels the closest to actual conversation that isn't the phone. — Chuck Klosterman

Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college. — 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

I think there's a greater detriment with our escalating progression toward the opposite extremity - the increasingly common ideology that assures people they're right about what they believe. And note that I used the word "detriment." I did not use the word "danger," because I don't think the notion of people living under the misguided premise that they're right is often dangerous. Most day-to-day issues are minor, the passage of time will dictate who was right and who was wrong, and the future will sort out the past. It is, however, socially detrimental. It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be. — 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

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

The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it's like Pet Sounds. — Chuck Klosterman

Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, "That would certainly make everything easier," even though I can't think of one person who'd qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson. — 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

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

The reason that people in the intellectual community argue that football is dangerous is because there's now a large swath of society that has no relationship to physicality or potential violence. — Chuck Klosterman

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

Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite. — Chuck Klosterman

So if you've seen Twelve Monkeys more than twice, you're probably a Calvinist. — Chuck Klosterman

Everything (N.W.A.) attempted had to possess criminal undertones. I can only assume they spent hours trying to deduce villainous ways to microwave popcorn (and if they'd succeeded, there would absolutely be a song about it, assumedly titled "Pop Goes the Corn Killa", or "45 Seconds to Bitch Snack"). — Chuck Klosterman

I never feel weird about being the main character in the nontransferable, nonexistent movie of my life. That's totally fine. What makes me nervous is a growing suspicion that this movie is fucked up and devoid of meaning. The auteur is a nihilist. — Chuck Klosterman

(The Eagles' song "Take It Easy") is clearly a problem of a young man, as no one over thirty-five could sustain interest in seven simultaneous relationships unless they're biracial and amazing at golf. — Chuck Klosterman

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

These are things like Michael Jackson's Thriller, an album that was (1) produced by Quincy Jones, (2) features guitar playing by Eddie Van Halen, (3) includes at least three singles that ooze awesomeness, and (4) has the single best bass line from the entire 1980s (i.e., the opening of "Billie Jean"). It is a "guilty pleasure," presumably, because 45 million people liked it, and because Jackson is quite possibly a pedophile, a d because two dancers had a really unfair knife fight in the video for "Beat It." This is akin to considering Thomas Jefferson a "guilty pleasure" among presidents because he briefly owned a pet bear. I mean, he still wrote the fucking Declaration of Independence, you know? — Chuck Klosterman

On the third play he dropped back to pass, and it was unadulterated chaos: The pocket was immediately collapsing, people were yelling, everything was happening at the same time, and it felt like he was trying to defuse a pipe bomb while learning to speak Cantonese."
"He believed it was his destiny to kill faceless foreigners for complex reasons that were beyond his control, and to deeply question the meaning of those murders, and to kill despite those questions, and to eventually understand the meaning of his own life through the battlefield executions of total strangers."
"Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation."
"There is no feeling that can match the emotive intensity of an attraction devoid of explanation. — 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

And if something is only itself, it doesn't particularly matter. — 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

All the world's stupidest people are either zealots or atheists. If you want to truly deduce how intelligent someone is, just ask this person how they feel about any issue that doesn't have an answer; the more certainty they express, the less sense they have. This is because certainty only comes from dogma. — Chuck Klosterman

[American football] fanbase resemble that of contemporary boxing: rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves. — Chuck Klosterman

Every generation is more influenced by technology, which is always changing faster. — 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

Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. — Chuck Klosterman

But when you're naturally better than everyone else, and when that talent is so utterly obvious, being quiet doesn't translate as humble. It translates as boredom. — Chuck Klosterman

If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you're really just following a rote creative template. That's the opposite of creativity. Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.
But ANYWAY ... — Chuck Klosterman

The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is midly zen. There are public road signs that say "Gusty Winds May Exist". This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice. — Chuck Klosterman

Here, of course, lies the biggest difference between a successful interviewer and an unsuccessful one: the successful one makes the interviewee feel as though he or she is interested in the answers. The unsuccessful interviewer - and I have sat in or listened to enough interviews to know, unfortunately, and disappointingly, how common they are - does not. — Chuck Klosterman

It seems as though our ability to change technology happens so quickly, and our ability to evolve as creatures is still very slow. — Chuck Klosterman

Saying you like "Piano Man" doesn't mean you like Billy Joel; it means you're willing to go to a piano bar if there's nothing else to do — Chuck Klosterman

The problem a lot of writers have is that they really, really enjoy people saying, "You're brilliant." They let their self-perception be dictated by reader response. But if you're going to let other people make you feel good, you're going to end up feeling bad when they say the opposite. You've got to be a cultural stoic. Then you won't be devastated by people who respond negatively. Of course, the downside is that it sort of stops you from being able to enjoy people liking your work. — Chuck Klosterman

[ ... ] outlining how certain fans of 'NSYNC like to imagine Justin Timber lake getting fisted by Lance Bass. Glenn Dixon surmised that much of the Contemporary Christian genre is driven by artists who literally want to fuck Jesus Christ. — Chuck Klosterman

People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they'd never admit in normal conversation. — Chuck Klosterman

If you're the type of person who wants to associate exclusively with those who perfectly mirror your own ethical worldview, you're reducing significantly the scope of your potential life experience. — Chuck Klosterman

At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice. — Chuck Klosterman

Because I'm 44, I feel kind of lucky that I lived through this period where I started my career where there was no Internet at all, and now when I finish it, there will be nothing but the Internet. — Chuck Klosterman

The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist the Internet is wonderful are those who need it to give their life meaning. — Chuck Klosterman

Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable. — Chuck Klosterman

Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way. — 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

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

Let's assume it was Christopher Columbus's "destiny" to discover the New World, and let's pretend he was consciously aware of that fact. What possible difference would that have made in his day-to-day life? He still had to build the boats. — Chuck Klosterman

I want fake love. But that's all I want, and that's why I can't have it. — Chuck Klosterman

The only modern narrative that handles the conundrum semi-successfully is Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, where schizophrenic heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal uses a portal to move back in time twelve days, thereby allowing himself to die in an accident he had previously avoided. By removing himself from the equation, he never meets his new girlfriend, which keeps her from dying in a car accident that was his fault. — Chuck Klosterman

My mind and gut are never simpatico: Every time I think somebody likes me, she doesn't; every time I think somebody doesn't like me, she does. This has never changed and I'm certain it never will. — Chuck Klosterman

I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, "I did it because I'm a dirty dog." This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one. — Chuck Klosterman

Maybe I could survive in one of those resort prisons where they house white-collar criminals. I've always wanted to get better at tennis. — Chuck Klosterman

Whenever I can't sleep, I like to lie in the darkness and pretend I've been assassinated. I've found this is the best way to get comfortable. I imagine I'm in the coffin at my funeral, and people from my past are walking by my corpse and making comments about my demise. — Chuck Klosterman

The future makes the rules. — Chuck Klosterman

The future is always impossible. — Chuck Klosterman

I don't go to scary movies. I don't like the experience of being scared. I think it's very weird that some people do. Obviously, humans are the only animals that do that. You don't see a wolf walk to the end of a cliff and look over the edge to freak himself out. — Chuck Klosterman

I tend to equate sadness with intelligence. — Chuck Klosterman

The single-biggest proof that the Dixie Chicks are Van Halen is their audience; they are singing to the same teenage boys, except those boys are now teenage girls. — Chuck Klosterman

We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex. — Chuck Klosterman

And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records. — Chuck Klosterman

I feel like a lot of people involved with celebrity journalism have interesting ideas about the people they want to write about going into the interview. Then as soon as they actually sit down with that person, they basically ask the questions they think journalists are supposed to ask, and they start viewing themselves almost as a peer of the subject. Like they're going to become friends. That's why most celebrity journalism is so terrible. — Chuck Klosterman

The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn't. It's just another gimmick, and it's no different than wanting to be with someone because they're thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown. — Chuck Klosterman

And it's kind of my own fault too, in the sense that I've used my own life as a literary device so much. I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. I find that most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen. — 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

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person - the "journey" of a particular "hero," in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell - as a prism for understanding everything else. — Chuck Klosterman

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

Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility. — Chuck Klosterman

This is a consistent theme in stories about traveling to the future: Things are always worse when you get there. And I suspect this is because the kind of writer who's intrigued by the notion of moving forward in time can't see beyond their own pessimism about being alive. People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves. — Chuck Klosterman

Let's say Donald Trump loses but it's close. That could change the whole way the job of being a politician shifts - that to succeed in politics, you have to be a caricature of what a politician is supposed to be like. — 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

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

I don't think we have any idea who we are. I think we're engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are. — Chuck Klosterman

[On political correctness:] Any intended message mattered less than the received message, and every received message could be interpreted in whatever way the receiver wanted. — Chuck Klosterman

It's possible for me to imagine a generation of people maybe two generations removed from you who might decide that we have an adversarial relationship with technology. — 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

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

and it occurred to me that people who don't talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they're guarding themselves for some sort of abstract dange, but they're actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they're like. — Chuck Klosterman

Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives. — Chuck Klosterman

Toby Keith writes songs like 1993's "Should've Been a Cowboy," and what's compelling is that you can't deconstruct its message. "Should've Been a Cowboy" is not like Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive," where Jon Bon Jovi claimed to live like a cowboy; Toby Keith wants to be a cowboy for real. — Chuck Klosterman

But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack. — 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

The message of "The Winner Takes It All" is straightforward: It argues that the concept of relationships ending on mutual terms is an emotional fallacy. One person is inevitably okay and the other is inevitably devastated. — Chuck Klosterman

The soul is a circle — Chuck Klosterman

If someone feels negative about the way society or culture seems to be going, what it probably suggests is that it's just moving away from the state that they are comfortable with or used to. It's understandable why someone would feel that way. — Chuck Klosterman

There are things we cannot control about ourselves. One of these things is the degree to which we find something to be funny. It — Chuck Klosterman

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

Now, I'm an apolitical person (which I realize is its own kind of misleading political posture, but I think you know what I mean). I do not have conventional political affiliations. I follow presidential elections the same way I follow the NFL playoffs: obsessively and dispassionately. But Sarah Palin was (and is) a real problem. Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840. — Chuck Klosterman

There's no such thing as middle-class. The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class, it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed. — Chuck Klosterman

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

Once people decide they want you to do something, they don't really care what your qualifications are. However you describe yourself becomes proof that you're the ideal candidate. This is true in journalism, and in life. — Chuck Klosterman