Chuck Klosterman quotes

Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they're honest about everything. (Chuck Klosterman)
Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite.
Chuck Klosterman
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.
Chuck Klosterman
Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available.
Chuck Klosterman
The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
Chuck Klosterman
Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch.
Chuck Klosterman
But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack.
Chuck Klosterman
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.
Chuck Klosterman
Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.
Chuck Klosterman
In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.
Chuck Klosterman
If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus. (Chuck Klosterman)
When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.
Chuck Klosterman
At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.
Chuck Klosterman
I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.
Chuck Klosterman
Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
Chuck Klosterman
The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.
Chuck Klosterman
The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll.
Chuck Klosterman
I've been asked about this constantly, and I compare it to how if you're walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and vomits on you: You wouldn't be hurt by that, you'd just think it's weird.
Chuck Klosterman
If you're doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you're not going to have a relationship with them, they're not going to like you, they're not going to be your friend.
Chuck Klosterman
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.
Chuck Klosterman
To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before. (Chuck Klosterman)
The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.
Chuck Klosterman
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.
Chuck Klosterman
Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
Chuck Klosterman
Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.
Chuck Klosterman