Whenever I can’t sleep, I like to lie in the darkness and pretend I’ve been assassinated. I’ve found this is the best way to get comfortable. I imagine I’m in the coffin at my funeral, and people from my past are walking by my corpse and making comments about my demise.

Chuck Klosterman

Categorized in : Past Lying Sleep

Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

Chuck Klosterman

process love art

It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.

Chuck Klosterman

peculiar remember trying

Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.

Chuck Klosterman

sex-drugs life-is thinking

Every possible opinion is authored about everything. What's going to eventually happen is someone will look back on this period and have to sift through it. The overwhelming majority of those opinions are going to be ignored, because if every opinion is being offered, really no opinion is being offered.

Chuck Klosterman

majority opinion looks

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

Chuck Klosterman

opinion

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. It's really hard to do a literary reproduction of what makes you happy. That's what I try to do. If nothing else, it seems like there's enough people out there telling the world what isn't cool, or what's terrible, or what's depressing. I think there's an element of cynicism in my writing, but I'm an optimistic cynic.

Chuck Klosterman

depressing hate moving

Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch.

Chuck Klosterman

recognition lunch loss

Sarcasm is when you tell someone the truth by lying on purpose.

Chuck Klosterman

sarcasm purpose lying

I think a bigger difference with social media is going to be things like the impact Instagram will have for historians. For the longest time, we had no images of the past. And then when we had the advent of the camera, we had a record of the things people chose to photograph, which, for a while, were portraits of your family, a new building we built, or a really big horse. Well now we have images of everything. That will be the biggest difference I think - that we will have a visual record of this reality in a way that will be completely covered.

Chuck Klosterman

horse reality past

First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.

Chuck Klosterman

too-much love-you firsts

Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.

Chuck Klosterman

replaced has-beens interesting

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want.

Chuck Klosterman

mother desire needs

Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that.

Chuck Klosterman

cliche important want

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.

Chuck Klosterman

people looks world

I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.

Chuck Klosterman

crazy reading book

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.

Chuck Klosterman

insane people years

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.

Chuck Klosterman

animal people thinking

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.

Chuck Klosterman

car music people

Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.

Chuck Klosterman

interaction soundtracks humans

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

Chuck Klosterman

dream trying people