Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

Instead, we were given a publication called the Weekly Reader, which was like a newspaper for four-foot illiterates.

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.

And this, of course, is the central problem with conspiracy theorists — once you inflexibly accept that something is a conspiracy, any contrary evidence has the paradoxical effect of making your case stronger. Every contradiction deepens the conspiracy.

We all convince ourselves of things like this- not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time.

Jewel moved 432,000 hardcover copies of A Night Without Armor, thereby making her the best-selling American poet of the past fifty years.

I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of '80s metal. It was-without question-the lamest instrument a band could use.

Is there anything more attractive than a polite person with limitless self-belief? There is not. Avoiding villainy is not that different from avoiding loneliness: First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.

The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It's a mistake that never stops being made.

Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect.

Leadership is a word people use to reconcile any kind of charisma that was impossible to otherwise explain.

I tend to equate sadness with intelligence.

We were just old enough to be warped by childhood and just young enough not to realize it.

The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.

The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love without any acumen of normalcy. There is no normal, because everyone is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can't compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door because they're probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller.

And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.

What music means is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations.

The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably.

It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdos who care the most.

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

I care about strangers when they're abstractions but feel almost nothing when they are literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was poorly written by me.

Sid and Nancy's relationship forever illustrates the worst part of being in love with anyone, which is that people in love can't be reasoned with.

Fake love is a very powerful thing.

I never feel weird about being the main character in the nontransferable, nonexistent movie of my life. That's totally fine. What makes me nervous is a growing suspicion that this movie is fucked up and devoid of meaning. The auteur is a nihilist.