Chuck Klosterman Quotes

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

Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.

Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that.

Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.

When I think about the future, I'm not necessarily arguing it's going to be better or worse. I'm just saying it's going to be different.

First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.

Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.

I can tell when I've met a bad journalist when they say, "I've met Madonna," or "I know Marilyn Manson." Because I haven't met anyone I've ever interviewed. I've sat down in the position of an interviewer, and they've sat down in the position of an artist trying to promote a product. We have no relationship. I'm able to ask them questions I'd never be allowed to ask them if we were casual friends. It's a completely constructed kind of situation.

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

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.

It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.

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

Why don't I like crowds? I suppose the worst possible thing I could say is that I don't like people, and that crowds are just collections of people. That seems like a very nihilistic way to look at the world.

People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.

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.

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

There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don't realize it.

What's kind of happening is the conflict over football might be a class conflict where there is a percentage of people who have no relationship to physicality and a percentage of the populace who still does.

I don't go to scary movies. I don't like the experience of being scared. I think it's very weird that some people do. Obviously, humans are the only animals that do that. You don't see a wolf walk to the end of a cliff and look over the edge to freak himself out.