Top 200 Chuck Klosterman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Whenever I can’t sleep, I like to lie in the darkness and pretend I’ve been assassinated. I’ve found this is the best way to get comfortable. I imagine I’m in the coffin at my funeral, and people from my past are walking by my corpse and making comments about my demise.”

— Chuck Klosterman

103. “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

104. “Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.”

— Chuck Klosterman

105. “I care about strangers when they’re abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they’re literally in front of me.”

— Chuck Klosterman

106. “Punk was perfect for lazy people, because anyone could do it – you didn’t even need to know how to play your instrument, assuming you knew how to plug it in. There was really no difference between Sid Vicious and anyone in London who owned a bass.”

— Chuck Klosterman

107. “Instead, we were given a publication called the Weekly Reader, which was like a newspaper for four-foot illiterates.”

— Chuck Klosterman

108. “Toby Keith writes songs like 1993′s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” and what’s compelling is that you can’t deconstruct its message. “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” is not like Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” where Jon Bon Jovi claimed to live like a cowboy; Toby Keith wants to be a cowboy for real.”

— Chuck Klosterman

109. “Life is rarely about what happened; it’s mostly about what we think happened.”

— Chuck Klosterman

110. “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

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

— Chuck Klosterman

112. “Batman never questions the logic of letting a childhood experience dictate his entire life.”

— Chuck Klosterman

113. “What those anti-cookie-baking mothers wanted me to do was turn baseball into soccer.”

— Chuck Klosterman

114. “The single-biggest proof that the Dixie Chicks are Van Halen is their audience; they are singing to the same teenage boys, except those boys are now teenage girls.”

— Chuck Klosterman

115. “Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.”

— Chuck Klosterman

116. “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

117. “The last girl I love will be someone I haven’t even met yet, probably.”

— Chuck Klosterman

118. “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

119. “According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where “survivors envy the dead,” which seems true only when I look at Twitter.”

— Chuck Klosterman

120. “Gay marriage should be legalized in america because gay men are the only men who want to be married.”

— Chuck Klosterman

121. “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.”

— Chuck Klosterman

122. “Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.”

— Chuck Klosterman

123. “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

124. “Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn’t get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available.”

— Chuck Klosterman

125. “I’m still alive, but I feel myself dying, person by person by person by person.”

— Chuck Klosterman

126. “Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting.”

— Chuck Klosterman

127. “It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine – something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game’s violence would save it, and it would never go away.”

— Chuck Klosterman

128. “The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn’t. It’s just another gimmick, and it’s no different than wanting to be with someone because they’re thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown.”

— Chuck Klosterman

129. “It was the kind of love you can only feel toward someone you don’t actually know.”

— Chuck Klosterman

130. “The essays are different because ultimately it’s things I’m interested in, and I’m really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.”

— Chuck Klosterman

131. “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

132. “Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.”

— Chuck Klosterman

133. “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

134. “The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don’t care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn’t matter to anyone who isn’t him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.”

— Chuck Klosterman

135. “Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives.”

— Chuck Klosterman

136. “It’s peculiar what you remember when you’re not trying.”

— Chuck Klosterman

137. “It’s possible this whole “Why do Latinos love Morrisey?” question will haunt us forever. Fortunately, Canadian academics are on the case.”

— Chuck Klosterman

138. “The things he did on purpose were usually no different from the mistakes he made by accident.”

— Chuck Klosterman

139. “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

140. “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

141. “It starts from the premise that black connotes evil and death in all cultures and hopes to figure out if “these associations influence people’s behavior in important ways. For example, does wearing black clothing lead both the wearer and others to perceive him or her as more evil and aggressive? More importantly, does it lead the wearer to actually act more aggressive?”

— Chuck Klosterman

142. “The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writers main motivation is to become friends with the band. Theyre not really journalists; theyre people who want to be involved in rock and roll.”

— Chuck Klosterman

143. “Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It’s human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can’t help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.”

— Chuck Klosterman

144. “There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder.”

— Chuck Klosterman

145. “Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people3 want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it’s interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all.”

— Chuck Klosterman

146. “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

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

— Chuck Klosterman

148. “I don’t think we have any idea who we are. I think we’re engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are.”

— Chuck Klosterman

149. “We were just old enough to be warped by childhood and just young enough not to realize it.”

— Chuck Klosterman

150. “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