Chuck Klosterman famous quotes

04-26-2025

Art and love are the same thing: Itâ€™s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Love #Art #Process
First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Love You #Too Much #Firsts
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.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Music #People #Car
and I spilled gravy on my Carolina sweater, because I am alive,
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Sweaters #Alive #Carolina
Punk was perfect for lazy people, because anyone could do it--you didn't even need to know how to play your instrument, assuming you knew how to plug it in. There was really no difference between Sid Vicious and anyone in London who owned a bass.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Lazy People #Play #Differences
People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves theyâ€™d never admit in normal conversation.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Dream #People #Trying
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 itâ€™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.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Writing #Ideas #Trying
Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Soundtracks #Interaction #Humans
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.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Country #People #World
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.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Falling In Love #Stupid #Kids
What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hair -- I needed long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical. I wanted to rock.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Mom #Fashion #Motivation
Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Struggle #Likes #Individual
Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Opinion
I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Relationship #Girl
Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Thinking #Life Is
The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Design #Creative #Vision
Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Way #Rich #Poor
Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Important #Want #Cliche
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

#Lying #People #Assuming
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.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Dying #Littles #Collections
Every one of Joel's important songs--including the happy ones--are ultimately about loneliness. And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's 'lonely lonely,' like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Song #Lonely #Clever
It feels so exhausting to be so bad at something I loved so much.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Feels
I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Care #Stranger #I Care
The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn't. It's just another gimmick, and it's no different than wanting to be with someone because they're thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown.
-- Chuck Klosterman

#Witty #Media #People
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

#War #Greatness #Doors

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