Chuck Klosterman Quotes - Page 7

When I was a film critic, the reason I kind of found it disenchanting was because the things that I wanted to talk about were the ideas in the movie, the theme of it, and contextual elements that weren't necessarily central to the story. But the only thing people really wanted was a plot description and how many stars I'd give it. It didn't matter how much effort you put into writing a piece, they looked at it solely as a consumer's guide toward going or not going to films.

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.

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.

...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.

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

There was a time in our very recent history when it was “interesting” to be a Star Wars fan. It was sort of like admitting you masturbate twice a day or that your favorite band was They Might Be Giants. Star Wars was something everyone of a certain age secretly loved but never openly recognized

We’re all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of. As far as I’m concerned, the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock.

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

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

As of right now, I am in love with her, and that love is the biggest problem in my life.

And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.

I tend to equate sadness with intelligence.

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.

People who are wrong during particularly important moments inevitably spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how their wrongness was paradoxically correct, or-at the very least-why their wrongness "felt right at the time," which is very, very different from being authentically correct.

[On political correctness:] Any intended message mattered less than the received message, and every received message could be interpreted in whatever way the receiver wanted.

The message of "The Winner Takes It All" is straightforward: It argues that the concept of relationships ending on mutual terms is an emotional fallacy. One person is inevitably okay and the other is inevitably devastated.

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

In New York, people are unhappy on purpose, because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington DC it just sort of works out that way.

Internet porn makes everything more reasonable -- once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.

Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture.

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.

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

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.

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.

Nine Inch Nails were the best and most popular industrial band of all time; as a consequence, industrial purists usually assert that Nine Inch Nails aren't an industrial band at all (this is a counterintuitive phenomenon that tends to occur with purists from all subcultures, musical or otherwise).