Chuck Klosterman Quotes

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagin...

If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend...

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain abo...

Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we fl...

There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterati...

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author l...

...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.

Sarcasm is when you tell someone the truth by lying on purpose.

However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they're selling nostalgia, which means they're sel...

Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the a...

....the increasingly common ideology that assures people they’re right about what they believe.... i...

The first moment someone calls for a revolution is usually the last moment I take them seriously.

... the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.

If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?

Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and...

The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the c...

Every night, we’re all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconsci...

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've ...

It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdo...

There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience...

We’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is un...

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apat...

Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.

Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in ...

Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film an...

...but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Inte...

I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting Newt Gingrich and having a chat with the fellow on a staircas...

It’s natural to think of one’s own life as a novel (or a movie or a play), and within that narrative...

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to...

If you play "I Don't Want To Know" by Fleetwood Mac loud enough -- you can hear Lindsey Buckingham's...

The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is midly zen. There are public road signs that say "Gusty Winds May Ex...

Perhaps we humans are still in command, and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in...

And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.

Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would al...

Record sales don't matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.

Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to lau...

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on ...

And if something is only itself, it doesn't particularly matter.

The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people wi...

And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is...

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently ...

It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.

Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger sel...

But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living i...

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say ...

I also need to prepare myself for the inevitability of utter boredom: Very often, single people don'...

It"s easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing w...

People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.

And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow...

It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack...

Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.

I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and ...

The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of n...

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violen...

...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that...

We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.

In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.

When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore?

Mass media has convinced us to think that silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of s...

The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued.

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every com...

I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.

Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.

There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing i...

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the...

But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single un...

...because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselve...

When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in...

Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect.

I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you play the stereo at max volume, it...

If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to cont...

Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

But I still feel like I lost.We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifet...

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a...

I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so ...

I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, "I did it b...

If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus.

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time...

As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn...

I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally i...

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.

It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support f...