Top 238 Quotes & Sayings by Chuck Klosterman

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.

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story.

I've been asked about this constantly, and I compare it to how if you're walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and vomits on you: You wouldn't be hurt by that, you'd just think it's weird.

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.

Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they're honest about everything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I also did an Ozzy piece for him, and so I got hired. Everything happened really fast. I can't give people advice, because everything in my life changed completely in less than a year and it's still not something I am used to.

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.

It didn't seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn't know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility.

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.

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

I keep saying the word 'weird' over and over again, but it's the only way I can describe it.

If you're doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you're not going to have a relationship with them, they're not going to like you, they're not going to be your friend.

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.

The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.

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.

The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll.

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.

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.

Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.

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.

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

Every possible opinion is authored about everything. What's going to eventually happen is someone will look back on this period and have to sift through it. The overwhelming majority of those opinions are going to be ignored, because if every opinion is being offered, really no opinion is being offered.

Maybe I don't need a relationship after all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.

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.

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.

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

The problem a lot of writers have is that they really enjoy people saying, "You're brilliant." They let their self-perception be dictated by reader response. But if you're going to let other people make you feel good, you're going to end up feeling bad when they say the opposite. You've got to be a cultural stoic. Then you won't be devastated by people who respond negatively. Of course, the downside is that it sort of stops you from being able to enjoy people liking your work.

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

I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.

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

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

Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.

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

The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.

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

It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.

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.

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

I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.

I think a bigger difference with social media is going to be things like the impact Instagram will have for historians. For the longest time, we had no images of the past. And then when we had the advent of the camera, we had a record of the things people chose to photograph, which, for a while, were portraits of your family, a new building we built, or a really big horse. Well now we have images of everything. That will be the biggest difference I think - that we will have a visual record of this reality in a way that will be completely covered.

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.

The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.' People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.

No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either. Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous.

Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.

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.

Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.

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

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.

The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.

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.

It is very easy for me to imagine in 200 years, people looking back at chemotherapy as proof that people of the 20th century were insane and just morons.

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

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

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.