Top 100 Klosterman Quotes
#1. Klosterman's Razor: the philosophical belief that the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with. _
Chuck Klosterman
#2. Sometimes writing is like talking to a stranger who's exactly like yourself in every possible way, only to realize that this stranger is as boring as shit.
Chuck Klosterman
#3. In some ways, Halloween is much easier for women. They can just dress as sluts, and it's kind of a costume, if they never do any other time.
Chuck Klosterman
#4. A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story.
Chuck Klosterman
#5. Because when push comes to shove, we really don't want to have sex with our friends ... unless they're sexy. And sometimes we do want to have sex with our blackhearted, soul-sucking enemies ... assuming they're sexy.
Chuck Klosterman
#6. But when you're naturally better than everyone else, and when that talent is so utterly obvious, being quiet doesn't translate as humble. It translates as boredom.
Chuck Klosterman
#7. Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music.
Chuck Klosterman
#8. If you're the type of person who wants to associate exclusively with those who perfectly mirror your own ethical worldview, you're reducing significantly the scope of your potential life experience.
Chuck Klosterman
#10. Even the invisible are insecure. It's the most universal problem we have. It's so universal, it might not even count as a problem.
Chuck Klosterman
#11. You're trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview.
Chuck Klosterman
#12. I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation. - Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life.
Chuck Klosterman
#13. 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
#14. According to the director, Primer is a movie about the relationship between risk and trust. This is true. But it also makes a concrete point about the potential purpose of time travel - it's too important to use only for money, but too dangerous to use for anything else.
Chuck Klosterman
#15. Every time I learn the truth about something, I'm disappointed
Chuck Klosterman
#16. It's possible for me to imagine a generation of people maybe two generations removed from you who might decide that we have an adversarial relationship with technology.
Chuck Klosterman
#17. I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.
Chuck Klosterman
#18. I keep saying the word 'weird' over and over again, but it's the only way I can describe it.
Chuck Klosterman
#19. At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.
Chuck Klosterman
#20. The most popular single in the world was "Livin' la Vida Loca," a song about how Pro Tools made Puerto Ricans gay.
Chuck Klosterman
#21. Before the 1975 fight in Manila, Ali bragged about attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting; he met with the KKK's leadership because they agreed on the issue of interracial marriage (both sides saw it as an atrocity). The
Chuck Klosterman
#22. My feelings about politics and literature and mathematics and the rest of life's minutiae can only be described through a labyrinthine of six-sided questions, but everything that actually matters can be explained by Lindsey fucking Buckingham and Stevie fucking Nicks in four fucking minutes.
Chuck Klosterman
#23. Maybe it takes forty years of your life to understand how the world seems to work.
Chuck Klosterman
#26. Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college.
Chuck Klosterman
#27. Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.
Chuck Klosterman
#28. 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
#29. We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.
Chuck Klosterman
#30. 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.
Chuck Klosterman
#31. 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.
Chuck Klosterman
#32. In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.
Chuck Klosterman
#33. Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility.
Chuck Klosterman
#34. Sid and Nancy's relationship forever illustrates the worst part of being in love with anyone, which is that people in love can't be reasoned with.
Chuck Klosterman
#35. The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.
Chuck Klosterman
#36. 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
#37. It is very easy for me to imagine in 200 years, people looking back at chemotherapy as proof that people of the 20th century were insane and just morons.
Chuck Klosterman
#38. We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.
Chuck Klosterman
#40. It's hard for Americans to differentiate between talent and notoriety; TV confuses people.
Chuck Klosterman
#41. I am of the opinion, and have been for a long time, that any kind of big technological move is almost always positive in the short term but inevitably somewhat negative in the long term. And I think there are many examples of this in every possible context.
Chuck Klosterman
#42. We're all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of. As far as I'm concerned, the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock.
Chuck Klosterman
#43. The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.
Chuck Klosterman
#44. Do you understand? Do you see the forest through the trees? Do you not see what I am no longer not saying to you? If so - congratulations! Prepare to have sex constantly.
Chuck Klosterman
#47. A whole bunch of months passed and I didn't hear anything and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age.
Chuck Klosterman
#48. 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
#49. Not all crazy people are brilliant, but almost all brilliant people are crazy.
Chuck Klosterman
#50. The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.
Chuck Klosterman
#51. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality
Chuck Klosterman
#52. It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdos who care the most.
Chuck Klosterman
#53. ...but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.
Chuck Klosterman
#54. One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we'd love to see (again) for the first time.
Chuck Klosterman
#55. The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
Chuck Klosterman
#56. Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.
Chuck Klosterman
#57. If you don't have a job, you don't have a fear of losing it. You fear having to get one.
Chuck Klosterman
#58. 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
#59. 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.
Chuck Klosterman
#60. I hate the point where you have to get off the ladder, or get back on. I don't know if that's a fear of heights, or literally a fear of falling. I want to be afraid to fall. That seems like a good fear.
Chuck Klosterman
#61. Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
Chuck Klosterman
#62. 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.
Chuck Klosterman
#63. TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder ceiling.
Chuck Klosterman
#64. Leadership is a word people use to reconcile any kind of charisma that was impossible to otherwise explain.
Chuck Klosterman
#65. To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before.
Chuck Klosterman
#66. Being a sexual icon is sort of like being the front man for an Orange County punk band: As soon as you can explain why you're necessary, you're over.
Chuck Klosterman
#67. History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "a set of lies agreed upon"). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.
Chuck Klosterman
#68. History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining.
Chuck Klosterman
#69. 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.
Chuck Klosterman
#70. People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.
Chuck Klosterman
#71. It feels so exhausting to be so bad at something I loved so much.
Chuck Klosterman
#72. An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the twenty-first century: "The biggest problem in my life," he said, "is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.
Chuck Klosterman
#73. That's like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths.
Chuck Klosterman
#74. Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.
Chuck Klosterman
#75. I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, "I did it because I'm a dirty dog." This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one.
Chuck Klosterman
#76. I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.
Chuck Klosterman
#77. 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.
Chuck Klosterman
#78. We must start from the premise that - in all likelihood - we are already wrong. And not "wrong" in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves.
Chuck Klosterman
#79. Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.
Chuck Klosterman
#80. If you're doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you're not going to have a relationship with them, they're not going to like you, they're not going to be your friend.
Chuck Klosterman
#81. [ ... ] outlining how certain fans of 'NSYNC like to imagine Justin Timber lake getting fisted by Lance Bass. Glenn Dixon surmised that much of the Contemporary Christian genre is driven by artists who literally want to fuck Jesus Christ.
Chuck Klosterman
#82. When given the choice, we'd all rather be happy now ... even if that guarantees we'll all be sad later.
Chuck Klosterman
#83. It didn't seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn't know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility.
Chuck Klosterman
#84. Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch.
Chuck Klosterman
#85. And I spilled gravy on my Carolina sweater, because I am alive,
Chuck Klosterman
#86. I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you plan the stereo at max volume, it's almost like the other people can't see into your vehicle. It tints your windows, somehow.
Chuck Klosterman
#87. It seems as though our ability to change technology happens so quickly, and our ability to evolve as creatures is still very slow.
Chuck Klosterman
#88. There are very few Americans who honestly care who Lindsay Lohan is dating. But it's still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they're worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something that they're missing.
Chuck Klosterman
#89. Jewel moved 432,000 hardcover copies of A Night Without Armor, thereby making her the best-selling American poet of the past fifty years.
Chuck Klosterman
#90. Because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they'd never admit in normal conversation. It's a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.
Chuck Klosterman
#91. A book becomes popular because of its text, but it's the subtext that makes it live forever. For
Chuck Klosterman
#92. I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.
Chuck Klosterman
#93. Accelerated culture does not respond well to the nonobvious.
Chuck Klosterman
#94. But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're
sharing a reality that doesn't exist.
Chuck Klosterman
#95. It"s easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing with a monster.
Chuck Klosterman
#96. His lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.
Chuck Klosterman
#97. It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.
Chuck Klosterman
#100. The Disco Group ABBA": They were beards and teeth and natural breasts and whiteness. I
Chuck Klosterman
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