Chuck Klosterman

There__ one kind of writing that__ always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of my life, I have tried to avoid this. In fact, I__e spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things. I understand Turtle__ motivation and I would have watched Medelin in the theater. I read Mary Worth every day for a decade. I__e seen Korn in concert three times and liked them once. I went to The Day After Tomorrow on opening night. I own a very expensive robot that doesn__ do anything. I am open to the possibility that everyting has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture.

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.

It"s easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing with a monster.

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It__ so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn__ dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They__ all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn__ even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend _ movies can__ show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.

Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused.

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.

...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.

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).

However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they're selling nostalgia, which means they're selling my own memories back to me, which means they're selling me to me.

People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

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

Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.

Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.