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If your archenemy tried to kill you, this person would attempt to stop him.
Chuck Klosterman
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Every one of Joel's important songs--including the happy ones--are ultimately about loneliness. And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's 'lonely lonely,' like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.
Chuck Klosterman
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If this person slept with your girlfriend, she would never be attractive to you again.
Chuck Klosterman
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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
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I like storms. I would say I actively like stormy weather. I would not be afraid of them. I think that if I had not pursued journalism, I think storm-chasing would've been a really fun career.
Chuck Klosterman
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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.
Chuck Klosterman
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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
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I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.
Chuck Klosterman
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Important things are inevitably cliché.
Chuck Klosterman
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You have punched this person in the face.
Chuck Klosterman
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This SimChuck is one suave bastard.
Chuck Klosterman
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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.
Chuck Klosterman
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Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist. But they do exist. They are unclear and/or unfathomable, but they’re out there. And—perhaps surprisingly—the only way to find those answers is to study NBA playoff games that happened twenty years ago. For all practical purposes, the voice of Brent Musburger was the pen of Ayn Rand.
Chuck Klosterman
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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.
Chuck Klosterman
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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.
Chuck Klosterman
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Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.
Chuck Klosterman
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I doubt that pornography has been good for the advancement of society, but I suspect it’s done wonders for the advancement of computer technology.
Chuck Klosterman
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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.
Chuck Klosterman
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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.
Chuck Klosterman
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I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. 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
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But it goes without saying that Michael Jordan could never date Pamela Anderson. That would cause the apocalypse.
Chuck Klosterman
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Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.
Chuck Klosterman
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As more and more people recognize the level of violence involved and the consequences of CTE [chronic traumatic encephelopathy, a degenerative brain disorder], they're obviously going to say "We don't want this to be a part of culture." And they overlook the fact that there's a huge swath of the populace where physicality is still a real common thing.
Chuck Klosterman
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Were there really this many women in 1985 saying to their husbands, 'Gee, honey, I'd love to have random strangers masturbate to a jpeg image of me deepthroating a titanium dildo, but there's no medium for that. Guess we'll have to watch 'Falcon Crest.'
Chuck Klosterman
