Top 200 Chuck Klosterman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I look at camping the same way I look at horror movies. All the years that humans fought to get into caves and into shelters – it almost seems sacrilegious to go outside and sleep without a roof. We work so hard to have these things!”

— Chuck Klosterman

52. “The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It’s a mistake that never stops being made.”

— Chuck Klosterman

53. “We all eventually become whatever we pretend to hate.”

— Chuck Klosterman

54. “Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they’re honest about everything.”

— Chuck Klosterman

55. “To me, fear of the future means fear of technology. I have a little bit of that. I still use it, but I kind of see technology as this harmful thing that’s so ingrained in my life that it sort of dictates and controls my relationship with it.”

— Chuck Klosterman

56. “Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility.”

— Chuck Klosterman

57. “Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.”

— Chuck Klosterman

58. “My mind and gut are never simpatico: Every time I think somebody likes me, she doesn’t; every time I think somebody doesn’t like me, she does. This has never changed and I’m certain it never will.”

— Chuck Klosterman

59. “It also creates a problematic reflection: If a villain is the person who knows the most and cares the least, then a hero is the person who cares too much without knowing anything. It makes every hero seem like Forrest Gump. But it’s not the intelligence that people dislike; it’s the dispassionate application of that intelligence. It’s the calculation. It’s someone who views life as a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for abuse.”

— Chuck Klosterman

60. “Let’s face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film “realistic,” everyone knows what that means – it means the movie has an unhappy ending.”

— Chuck Klosterman

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

— Chuck Klosterman

62. “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

63. “Science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people.”

— Chuck Klosterman

64. “Styx and The Stones may break my bones but ‘More than Words’ will never hurt me.”

— Chuck Klosterman

65. “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

66. “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

67. “The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.”

— Chuck Klosterman

68. “The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.”

— Chuck Klosterman

69. “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

70. “If I were an adult, I would be drinking coffee; as it is, I’m drinking Mountain Dew.”

— Chuck Klosterman

71. “Perhaps we humans are still in command, and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in the not-so-distant future. If so, let’s roll.”

— Chuck Klosterman

72. “It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.”

— Chuck Klosterman

73. “We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live.”

— Chuck Klosterman

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

— Chuck Klosterman

75. “It doesn’t matter what you can do if you don’t know why you’re doing it.”

— Chuck Klosterman

76. “We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.”

— Chuck Klosterman

77. “But regardless of the direction you move, the central problem is still there: Why do it? What’s the best reason for exploding the parameters of reality? With the possible exception of eating a dinosaur, I don’t think there is one.”

— Chuck Klosterman

78. “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.”

— Chuck Klosterman

79. “This is the difference between the fox and the hedgehog. Both creatures know that storytelling is everything, and that the only way modern people can understand history and politics is through the machinations of a story. But only the hedgehog knows that storytelling is secretly the problem, which is why the fox is constantly wrong.”

— Chuck Klosterman

80. “Every time I learn the truth about something, I’m disappointed.”

— Chuck Klosterman

81. “Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want.”

— Chuck Klosterman

82. “That’s like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths.”

— Chuck Klosterman

83. “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.”

— Chuck Klosterman

84. “It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.”

— Chuck Klosterman

85. “Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.”

— Chuck Klosterman

86. “But it goes without saying that Michael Jordan could never date Pamela Anderson. That would cause the apocalypse.”

— Chuck Klosterman

87. “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

88. “Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.”

— Chuck Klosterman

89. “The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it’s like Pet Sounds. The wide-scale adoption of political correctness was silly, but not unreasonable. The freedom that was lost was mostly theoretical and rarely necessary. No one is significantly worse off.”

— Chuck Klosterman

90. “The falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was.”

— Chuck Klosterman

91. “We’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.”

— Chuck Klosterman

92. “The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist the Internet is wonderful are those who need it to give their life meaning.”

— Chuck Klosterman

93. “I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them and the man in the caboose is tearing up the rails the moment they are passed. There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed.”

— Chuck Klosterman

94. “Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance.”

— Chuck Klosterman

95. “Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch.”

— Chuck Klosterman

96. “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

97. “Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better – not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities.”

— Chuck Klosterman

98. “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

99. “Every night, we’re all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one’s teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we’ve stopped trying to figure out what they mean.”

— Chuck Klosterman

100. “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