Chuck Klosterman Quotes
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Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The debate about climate change in many ways is tied to the petroleum industry. If the value of petroleum was considerably less than it is, and the value of coal was considerably less than it is, there would be much less debate about this.
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Maybe it takes forty years of your life to understand how the world seems to work.
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I think a bigger difference with social media is going to be things like the impact Instagram will have for historians. For the longest time, we had no images of the past. And then when we had the advent of the camera, we had a record of the things people chose to photograph, which, for a while, were portraits of your family, a new building we built, or a really big horse. Well now we have images of everything. That will be the biggest difference I think - that we will have a visual record of this reality in a way that will be completely covered.
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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.
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I think this is the kind of thing where we're rapidly moving toward an age where most of the populace will be almost unable to imagine life without an Internet component interlocked with it.
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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.
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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.
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The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.
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Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.
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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.
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It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.
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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.
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You have punched this person in the face.
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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.
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But it goes without saying that Michael Jordan could never date Pamela Anderson. That would cause the apocalypse.
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Science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people.
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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.
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What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?
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Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
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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.