Chuck Klosterman Quotes
-
What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hair -- I needed long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical. I wanted to rock.
-
We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.
-
If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.
-
Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.
-
I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.
-
If you can't swim, the idea of being in nine feet of water is terrifying, much less the ocean.
-
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.
-
The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.
-
Prior to the early 20th century, for the totality of humankind's existence if they saw something moving, it meant it was there. If they saw a tiger walking, that meant they were near a live tiger. This was entrenched in our subconscious and our unconscious.Then that drastically changed with film and television.
-
I can tell when I've met a bad journalist when they say, "I've met Madonna," or "I know Marilyn Manson." Because I haven't met anyone I've ever interviewed. I've sat down in the position of an interviewer, and they've sat down in the position of an artist trying to promote a product. We have no relationship. I'm able to ask them questions I'd never be allowed to ask them if we were casual friends. It's a completely constructed kind of situation.
-
Styx and The Stones may break my bones but 'More than Words' will never hurt me.
-
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.
-
What's kind of happening is the conflict over football might be a class conflict where there is a percentage of people who have no relationship to physicality and a percentage of the populace who still does.
-
It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.
-
When given the choice, we’d all rather be happy now … even if that guarantees we’ll all be sad later.
-
People hate the feeling that technology is dragging them into the future, that they're not really following what's happening, but being forced to be involved. Even if it makes their life better, it still feels like it's happening against their will.
-
In the Far East, it's very normal for people to wear masks in flu season. I don't know if I'd ever do that, though, because I don't like having things on my face.
-
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.
-
Internet porn makes everything more reasonable -- once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.
-
If invited, you would go to this person's wedding and give them a spice rack, but you would secretly hope that their marriage ends in a bitter, public divorce.
-
First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.