A biography for Chuck Klostermanhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.”
“A whole bunch of months passed and I didn't hear anything and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age.”
“In Fargo, they say, well, that's a job. How well do you get paid? For example, for this book I was written about in Entertainment Weekly, and it was kind of cool because my mom asked me if Entertainment Weekly was a magazine or a newspaper.”
“Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.”
“...because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they'd never admit in normal conversation. It's a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.”
“I keep saying the word 'weird' over and over again, but it's the only way I can describe it.”
“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. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack.”
“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.”
“I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, "I did it because I'm a dirty dog." This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one.”
“In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.”
“Mass media has convinced us to think that silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone and the relationship is over (hence the phrase “We just don’t talk anymore”).”
“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.”
“It's just that what's important there is different there than what's important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Record sales don't matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.”