Chuck Klosterman Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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But no matter how many times we re-rank the presidents, in another 200 years, the top presidents will still be Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson, because they defined what a president is. They are the idea, and you can't be better than the idea.
Chuck Klosterman
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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
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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
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The things he did on purpose were usually no different from the mistakes he made by accident.
Chuck Klosterman
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Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.
Chuck Klosterman
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I write pretty fast, probably faster than most people. But I might think about something for six hours, then write it in 20 minutes. So did I write for six hours and 20 minutes, or just 20 minutes? I used to write absolutely every day, except for days when I had to travel or something.
Chuck Klosterman
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We are often wrong about the past, but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.
Chuck Klosterman
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If rain was God crying, I think God was drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus.
Chuck Klosterman
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Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real. They want men to adore them like Lloyd Dobler would, and they want women to think like Aimee Mann, and they expect all their arguments to sound like Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. They think everything will work out perfectly in the end (just like it did for Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones and Nick Hornby's Rob Fleming), and they don't stop believing because Journey's Steve Perry insists we should never do that.
Chuck Klosterman
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No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either. Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous.
Chuck Klosterman
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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
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It doesn't matter what you can do if you don't know why you're doing it.
Chuck Klosterman
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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. 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.
Chuck Klosterman
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If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus.
Chuck Klosterman
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The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.
Chuck Klosterman
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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
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I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.
Chuck Klosterman
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People are more interested in reading bombastic ideas, whether they're positive or negative. Part of me has sort of lost interest in doing criticism because of that. I've always realized that criticism is basically autobiography. Obviously in my criticism, it's very clear that it's autobiography, but I think it's that way for everybody.
Chuck Klosterman
