Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

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

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film realistic, everyone knows what that means--it means the movie has an unhappy ending.

If someone breaks your heart, just punch them in the face. Oh sure, it seems obvious now, but you'd be amazed at how many people don't think of it when it's relevant. Seriously, just punch them in the face and go get some ice cream.

I want fake love. But that's all I want, and that's why I can't have it.

All the world's stupidest people are either zealots or atheists. If you want to truly deduce how intelligent someone is, just ask this person how they feel about any issue that doesn't have an answer; the more certainty they express, the less sense they have. This is because certainty only comes from dogma.

I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as the sport of the future since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.

My feelings about politics and literature and mathematics and the rest of life's minutiae can only be described through a labyrinthine of six-sided questions, but everything that actually matters can be explained by Lindsey fucking Buckingham and Stevie fucking Nicks in four fucking minutes.

and I spilled gravy on my Carolina sweater, because I am alive

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.

The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.

No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn't have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.

There are very few Americans who honestly care who Lindsay Lohan is dating. But it's still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they're worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something that they're missing.

Being a sexual icon is sort of like being the front man for an Orange County punk band: As soon as you can explain why you're necessary, you're over.

Is there anything more attractive than a polite person with limitless self-belief? There is not.

The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued.

there's no such thing as middle-class. The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class, it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed.

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.

But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're sharing a reality that doesn't exist.

Nine Inch Nails were the best and most popular industrial band of all time; as a consequence, industrial purists usually assert that Nine Inch Nails aren't an industrial band at all (this is a counterintuitive phenomenon that tends to occur with purists from all subcultures, musical or otherwise).

outlining how certain fans of 'NSYNC like to imagine Justin Timber lake getting fisted by Lance Bass. Glenn Dixon surmised that much of the Contemporary Christian genre is driven by artists who literally want to fuck Jesus Christ.

Toby Keith writes songs like 1993's Should've Been a Cowboy, and what's compelling is that you can't deconstruct its message. Should've Been a Cowboy is not like Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive, where Jon Bon Jovi claimed to live like a cowboy; Toby Keith wants to be a cowboy for real.

Everything (N.W.A.) attempted had to possess criminal undertones. I can only assume they spent hours trying to deduce villainous ways to microwave popcorn (and if they'd succeeded, there would absolutely be a song about it, assumedly titled Pop Goes the Corn Killa, or 45 Seconds to Bitch Snack).

The reason behind everything always has to be something else entirely.