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.

— Chuck Klosterman

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

— Chuck Klosterman

I also need to prepare myself for the inevitability of utter boredom: Very often, single people don't do shit. They do nothing, all night long. They sit in a recliner and watch TV. I've probably watched more television than anyone you've ever met, and I don't even own one. Terrible shows, good shows, Golf tournaments in Cancun. C-SPAN. Hours of Oprah. Law and Order. Lonely people love Law and Order, for whatever reason. They prefer the straight narratives. p60

— Chuck Klosterman

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

— Chuck Klosterman

If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?

— Chuck Klosterman

If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.

— Chuck Klosterman

If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus.

— Chuck Klosterman

If you play "I Don't Want To Know" by Fleetwood Mac loud enough -- you can hear Lindsey Buckingham's fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar. ... And we were convinced that this was the definitive illustration of what we both loved about music; we loved hearing the INSIDE of a song.

— Chuck Klosterman

If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. 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. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the "form of funny," which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness.

— Chuck Klosterman

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

— Chuck Klosterman