Top 200 Chuck Klosterman Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Maybe I could survive in one of those resort prisons where they house white-collar criminals. I’ve always wanted to get better at tennis.”

— Chuck Klosterman

152. “I’ve obliterated three days trying to come up with an elegant way to write what I’m about to write, but I think the least elegant way is probably best: I like Kanye West.”

— Chuck Klosterman

153. “Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.”

— Chuck Klosterman

154. “We argued about how hard it would be to ride a bear, assuming said bear was muzzled.”

— Chuck Klosterman

155. “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

156. “Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, “That would certainly make everything easier,” even though I can’t think of one person who’d qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson.”

— Chuck Klosterman

157. “If I’m around spiders, my fear isn’t so much the spider, but my fear is that I’m somewhere rustic and that spiders are crawling around. I must be in the woods.”

— Chuck Klosterman

158. “Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend – movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.”

— Chuck Klosterman

159. “The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation – and that’s almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.”

— Chuck Klosterman

160. “I’m good at being by myself. I guess if you’re a writer you get used to that.”

— Chuck Klosterman

161. “When you’re writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can’t swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you’re writing for the next day.”

— Chuck Klosterman

162. “I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is.”

— Chuck Klosterman

163. “All my friends are rock critics, so we talk about rock criticism a lot. Because of that, in order to be part of the conversation, you have to have an awareness of what the discussion is.”

— Chuck Klosterman

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus – as a writer myself – I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite.”

— Chuck Klosterman

168. “I grew up on a farm, and we didn’t have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn’t inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it.”

— Chuck Klosterman

169. “When I’m walking around, I’m usually drinking pop, so I can’t have a mask on. That’s why I couldn’t be a surgeon.”

— Chuck Klosterman

170. “When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the ‘presidential greatness poll’ in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone.”

— Chuck Klosterman

171. “In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person – the “journey” of a particular “hero,” in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell – as a prism for understanding everything else.”

— Chuck Klosterman

172. “And when they finally demanded that I had to stop keeping score and that I needed to play every future contest as an exhibition, I casually made the kind of statement sixteen-year-olds should not make to forty-six-year-old Midwestern housewives: “Why are you telling me how to do my job?” I asked. “It’s not like I show up in your kitchen and tell you when to bake cookies.”

— Chuck Klosterman

173. “Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously both cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist.”

— Chuck Klosterman

174. “I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of ’80s metal. It was-without question-the lamest instrument a band could use.”

— Chuck Klosterman

175. “In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant.”

— Chuck Klosterman

176. “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.”

— Chuck Klosterman

177. “This made her remember why people take up walking: It is because they no longer have anywhere to go.”

— Chuck Klosterman

178. “The only modern narrative that handles the conundrum semi-successfully is Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, where schizophrenic heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal uses a portal to move back in time twelve days, thereby allowing himself to die in an accident he had previously avoided. By removing himself from the equation, he never meets his new girlfriend, which keeps her from dying in a car accident that was his fault.”

— Chuck Klosterman

179. “Mostly, we argued about who which of us was better at arguing, and particularly about who had won the previous argument.”

— Chuck Klosterman

180. “By now, everyone I know is one of seven strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Read World is the real world is The Real World is the read world. It’s the same true story, even when it isn’t.”

— Chuck Klosterman

181. “No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.”

— Chuck Klosterman

182. “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

183. “In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.”

— Chuck Klosterman

184. “We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having none at all.”

— Chuck Klosterman

185. “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.”

— Chuck Klosterman

186. “Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner.”

— Chuck Klosterman

187. “Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn’t there.”

— Chuck Klosterman

188. “The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.”

— Chuck Klosterman

189. “The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.”

— Chuck Klosterman

190. “Every time period that’s ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism ‘May you live in interesting times’ did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living.”

— Chuck Klosterman

191. “The concept of “selling out” – and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything – is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.”

— Chuck Klosterman

192. “The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.”

— Chuck Klosterman

193. “If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.”

— Chuck Klosterman

194. “It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome. The United States experienced a prolonged period of economic growth without the protracted complications of a hot or cold war, making it possible to focus on one’s own subsistence as if the rest of society were barely there.”

— Chuck Klosterman

195. “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.”

— Chuck Klosterman

196. “The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music.”

— Chuck Klosterman

197. “Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option.”

— Chuck Klosterman

198. “The flavor was nothing like beer. It was closer to cheap champagne mixed with Sprite, and – unlike beer – it was the opposite of an acquired taste. Every new Zima went down slightly worse than the previous Zima. There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist.”

— Chuck Klosterman

199. “A person native to the twenty-first century can’t really reconcile why anyone would pay $13.25 for twelve fixed songs that could only be played on specific high-end electronics serving no other function; the majority of all recorded music can now be instantly accessed anywhere for less than $10 a month.”

— Chuck Klosterman

200. “Football combines two of the worst features of American life,” wrote conservative baseball scholar George Will. “It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

— Chuck Klosterman