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 are very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

— Chuck Klosterman

It’s natural to think of one’s own life as a novel (or a movie or a play), and within that narrative we are always the central character. Thoughtful people try to overcome this compulsion, but they usually fail (in fact, trying makes it worse). In a commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace argued that conquering the preoccupation with self is pretty much the whole objective of being alive — but if we are to believe Wallace succeeded at this goal, it must be the darkest success imaginable.

— Chuck Klosterman

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.

— Chuck Klosterman

I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting Newt Gingrich and having a chat with the fellow on a staircase,” ex–Sex Pistols vocalist John Lydon once told Rolling Stone. “I found him completely dishonest and totally likable, because he doesn’t care.

— Chuck Klosterman

... I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.

— Chuck Klosterman

I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

— Chuck Klosterman

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’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend — movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

— Chuck Klosterman

Mass media has convinced us to think that silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone, and the relationship is over (hence the phrase “We just don’t talk anymore”).

— Chuck Klosterman

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.

— Chuck Klosterman

Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.

— Chuck Klosterman