Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

If you like harmonies or guitar overdubs or the sun or Norwegian lesbians or taking drugs during funerals or the invention of sound, you will probably enjoy these records. Rubber Soul gets an A- because I don't speak French.

If you aspire to be truly open-minded, you can't just try to see the other side of an argument. That's not enough. You have to go all the way. Over

Taste is subjective, but some subjective opinions are casually expressed the same way we articulate principles of math or science

A book become popular because of its text, but it's the subtext that makes it live forever. For the true obsessive, whatever an author doesn't explicitly explain ends up becoming everything that matters most (and since it's inevitably the obsessives who keep art alive, they make the rules).

History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining

The so-called Rad Four donned comedic Technicolor dream coats, consumed seven hundred sheets of mediocre acid on the roof of the studio, and proceeded to make Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a ground breaking record no one actually likes.

Now hitting on all sixteen cylinders, the Beatles bolted back to the woodshed for The Beatles, a blandly designed masterwork that could inspire any reasonable California citizen to launch a race war.

The first moment someone calls for a revolution is usually the last moment I take them seriously.

It's hard for Americans to differentiate between talent and notoriety; TV confuses people.

Pessimists thought this shutdown would kill baseball entirely. It did not. But it does represent the point where baseball's past became more desirable than baseball's future, an inversion that would never really reverse itself.

If everyone enjoyed something, how good could it possibly be?

And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary.

The solution to this paradox (according to Palahniuk) is the theory of splintered alternative realities, where all possible trajectories happen autonomously and simultaneously (sort of how Richard Linklater describes The Wizard of Oz to an uninterested cab driver in the opening sequence of Slacker).

Something that's only metaphorically alive can never be literally dead.

While accepting the award for Best Director, Cameron quoted the most embarrassing line of dialogue from his own script: "I'm the king of the world!" Had this come from almost any other nineties figure, that would have seemed like self-deprecating irony. Coming from Cameron, it was not.

It's someone who views life as a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for abuse.

And this is not a criticism of coolness: by and large, the musical component of rock isn't nearly as important as the iconography and the posturing and the idea of what we're supposed to be experiencing. If given the choice between hearing a great band and seeing a cool band, I'll take the latter every single time; this is why the Eagles suck.

The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

As of the writing of this particular book, I have 43 "close friends,"* 196 "good friends,"** and 2,200 "affable acquaintances."*** *These are people I would phone immediately if I was diagnosed with lung cancer. ** These are people whose death from lung cancer would make me profoundly sad. *** These are people I would generally hope would recover from lung cancer.

What seemed enticing about the seventies was that life experiences were still unscripted, and that no one had figured out how to give the people what they wanted before the people even knew what that was.

But at that particular moment in time, he was the hottest director in the hemisphere. Critics had loved his unsentimental debut Dead Antelope, and it had become trendy to suggest his sophomore effort, Kiki Vandeweghe, should have won the Oscar for Best Picture.

There's a communal memory of Cobain's wearing flannel in this video, and that this image was the dawn of grunge fashion. This, however, is another case of the Mandela Effect—he's just wearing a brown shirt with green stripes.

The nineties were (and shall always remain) the absolute zenith for bands whose goal was selling records.

So this, I suspect, is where we really begin: In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.