Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

Part of the Gen X irony fixation was the result of so much accepted obviousness: When you made a TV show about the seventies, you could just call it That '70s Show . Was that title clever, or was that title lazy? It was impossible to know.

I attempted to make a more academic argument about how the Limp Bizkit song "Nookie" was misogynist for suggesting that the protagonist's ex-girlfriend should inject a cookie into her vagina (or maybe that she should somehow fold her vagina into her rectum — the specific lyrics have never been clear).

It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and O. J. Simpson have a lot in common. We don't normally lump them together, because certain key contrasts are tricky — for example, one man is a Muslim intellectual and the other more or less decapitated his ex-wife.

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.

Anything experienced through the screen of a television becomes a TV show.

I've obliterated three days trying to come up with an elegant way to write what I'm about to write, but I think the least elegant way is probably best: I like Kanye West.

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.

songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real.

I have a colleague who feels anyone over the age of twenty-one caught reading a Harry Potter novel should be executed without trial, but that strikes me as unreasonable; the fact that they're written for British thirteen-year-olds probably means they're the right speed for 90 percent of American adults.

Not all crazy people are brilliant, but almost all brilliant people are crazy.

Football combines two of the worst features of American life," wrote conservative baseball scholar George Will. "It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

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.

Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.

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.

They [dolphins] are my least favorite member of the animal kingdom. Everyone seems to think dolphins are cute and intelligent, but they're best described as ugly and impractical. I don't want to come across as insensitive, but show me a person whose intelligence equates to that of a dolphin and I will show you a fucking retard.

Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water).

Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless… I never have any idea how other people feel; they always appear fine to me. But if somebody had pointedly played Pat Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield" that night, I'm sure I could have constructed some empathy.

Both lyrically and sonically, glam metal is the sensible accompaniment for removing one's pants for money.

But regardless of the direction you move, the central problem is still there: Why do it? What's the best reason for exploding the parameters of reality? With the possible exception of eating a dinosaur, I don't think there is one.

It starts from the premise that black connotes evil and death in all cultures and hopes to figure out if "these associations influence people's behavior in important ways. For example, does wearing black clothing lead both the wearer and others to perceive him or her as more evil and aggressive? More importantly, does it lead the wearer to actually act more aggressive?

The defining line from Frank Herbert's Dune argues that the mystery of life "is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced." My fantasy offers the opposite. Nothing would be experienced. Nothing would feel new or unknown or jarring. It's a fantasy for people who want to solve life's mysteries without having to do the work.