Chuck Klosterman People Quotations

It didn't seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn't know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility.

A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story.

I also did an Ozzy piece for him, and so I got hired. Everything happened really fast. I can't give people advice, because everything in my life changed completely in less than a year and it's still not something I am used to.

I grew up on a farm, and we didn't have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn't inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it.

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

It's just that what's important there is different there than what's important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media.

You're trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview.

I got to Spin because I put my phone number in the front of Fargo Rock City and one of the people who called me was David Byrne.

In the Far East, it's very normal for people to wear masks in flu season. I don't know if I'd ever do that, though, because I don't like having things on my face.

I write pretty fast, probably faster than most people. But I might think about something for six hours, then write it in 20 minutes. So did I write for six hours and 20 minutes, or just 20 minutes? I used to write absolutely every day, except for days when I had to travel or something.

I used to watch a lot of documentaries about Satanic possession - and I don't know if this is racist or not - but in the documentaries, it never happened to Americans! It was always happening in Central America or South America; that's where the priest was always going down to exorcise possessed people. So I didn't have a lot of fear of being possessed by the devil.

As an adult, the only people who care about horror movies are academics. No one loves to talk about horror films more than somebody with a Ph.D. in cultural studies at a university.

The thing that has always baffled me about people's perception of my writing is the sense that I'm a very controversial, opinionated, polarizing person. I feel like I write about things that I'm interested in, and I describe why they're interesting to me. I could be negative, I guess. It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good.

Sure there's a percentage of people who are like, "It snowed in May. I don't believe in climate change." Well, that's crazy, but that's always gonna be the case. I suppose if climate change happens much faster than even the dire experts predict, then I suppose opinions will change.

Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music.

Technology evolves faster than people do, faster than biology does.

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.

As more and more people recognize the level of violence involved and the consequences of CTE [chronic traumatic encephelopathy, a degenerative brain disorder], they're obviously going to say "We don't want this to be a part of culture." And they overlook the fact that there's a huge swath of the populace where physicality is still a real common thing.

Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can't really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn't work even half the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretched people in the word are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.' People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.

Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.

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.

In baseball and sex, cliches are usually true: pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn't seem to care.

The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn't. It's just another gimmick, and it's no different than wanting to be with someone because they're thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown.

What's kind of happening is the conflict over football might be a class conflict where there is a percentage of people who have no relationship to physicality and a percentage of the populace who still does.

People hate the feeling that technology is dragging them into the future, that they're not really following what's happening, but being forced to be involved. Even if it makes their life better, it still feels like it's happening against their will.

In New York, people are unhappy on purpose, because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington DC it just sort of works out that way.

I think one of the many interesting things about [Donald] Trump is that people in the media did not take him seriously for months. Then, when it was clear he was going to be the nominee, they immediately hit the panic button. I think they overlook the possibility that he could just be a really bad president in the way that presidents are traditionally bad.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word “coincidence” exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

Science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people.

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live.

It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.

-- and it occurred to me that people who don't talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they're guarding themselves for some sort of abstract dange, but they're actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they're like.

The reason that people in the intellectual community argue that football is dangerous is because there's now a large swath of society that has no relationship to physicality or potential violence.

It's possible for me to imagine a generation of people maybe two generations removed from you who might decide that we have an adversarial relationship with technology.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.

It is very easy for me to imagine in 200 years, people looking back at chemotherapy as proof that people of the 20th century were insane and just morons.

The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.

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

I think people's relationship with the concept of violence changes, and that to me might be a little more interesting.

Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not- even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian- it's only a matter of time.

People can demand someone they've never met be arrested and thrown in jail forever because they know it's never going to happen and they're never going to see this person.

Why don't I like crowds? I suppose the worst possible thing I could say is that I don't like people, and that crowds are just collections of people. That seems like a very nihilistic way to look at the world.

People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.

The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.' People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.

I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you plan the stereo at max volume, it's almost like the other people can't see into your vehicle. It tints your windows, somehow.

The problem a lot of writers have is that they really, really enjoy people saying, "You're brilliant." They let their self-perception be dictated by reader response. But if you're going to let other people make you feel good, you're going to end up feeling bad when they say the opposite. You've got to be a cultural stoic. Then you won't be devastated by people who respond negatively. Of course, the downside is that it sort of stops you from being able to enjoy people liking your work.

This made her remember why people take up walking: It is because they no longer have anywhere to go.

I don't go to scary movies. I don't like the experience of being scared. I think it's very weird that some people do. Obviously, humans are the only animals that do that. You don't see a wolf walk to the end of a cliff and look over the edge to freak himself out.