Chuck Klosterman Quotes
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The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.
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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.
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If I had to make a choice between only writing about sports or only writing about music, I would probably write about music. I'm not sure why that is. There seems to be more to write about with music, just because it's more of a splintered thing. There's more subgenres. With sports, it's more objective in a way.
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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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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.
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If you can't swim, the idea of being in nine feet of water is terrifying, much less the ocean.
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This made her remember why people take up walking: It is because they no longer have anywhere to go.
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And I spilled gravy on my Carolina sweater, because I am alive.
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I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.
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People can demand someone they've never met be arrested and thrown in jail forever because they know it's never going to happen and they're never going to see this person.
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Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can't really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn't work even half the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretched people in the word are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.' People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.
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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.
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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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As an adult, the only people who care about horror movies are academics. No one loves to talk about horror films more than somebody with a Ph.D. in cultural studies at a university.
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At some point in the past, this person was (arguably) your best friend.
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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.
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We smooch hardcore.
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A homeless man once told me that dancing to rap music is the cultural equivalent of masturbating, and I'd sort of fell the same way about playing John Madden Football immediately after filing my income tax: It's fun, but - somehow - vaguely pathetic.
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Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous existence. For example, infants who die from SIDs were actually great people when they were alive for real, so they get to go to heaven after a mere five weeks in purgatory. Meanwhile anyone Willard Scott ever congratulated for turning one hundred two was obviously a terrible individual who had many many previous sins to pay for and had to spend a century in his or her own unknown purgatory even though the person seemed perfectly wholesome in this particular world.
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When I'm walking around, I'm usually drinking pop, so I can't have a mask on. That's why I couldn't be a surgeon.
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It's possible this whole "Why do Latinos love Morrisey?" question will haunt us forever. Fortunately, Canadian academics are on the case.
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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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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.
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Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.