Chuck Klosterman IV:A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

IV is a compilation of Klosterman's previously published articles and columns (taken from Spin, Esquire, etc) plus a bit of fiction tagged onto the end. The only things "new" in the book are the introductions, footnotes, and hypothetical questions.
I realize the guy is pretty polarizing, but you've got to admit he's quotable. That said, this entry is gigantic. Sorry!

"Self-consciousness is never sexy."

"...arrogance doesn't matter if you're right."

"If something is good today, it will be good tomorrow. Variety is overrated; variety is for philanderers."

"American culture is nothing more than a pastiche of fixations. We are obsessed with health. We are obsessed with pleasure. We are obsessed with speed. We are obsessed with efficiency. In simplest terms, we are obsessed by the desire to accelerate every element of our existence in a futile attempt to experience as much life as we can in the shortest possible time. We have all entered a race to devour the largest volume of gratification before it kills us."
"Nobody over the age of six actively aspires to go to McDonald's but--eventually--everyone does."

"words and their meanings have been swallowed by the deep-fat fryer of social depravity."

"Staying alive is complicated. It's the single most difficult thing every single person does every single day. There is just so much in this wicked world that can kill us: cancer, avalanches, liver failure, street gangs wearing baseball uniforms, gravity, electric chairs, death squads, hammerhead sharks, werewolves, hemlock, and a boundless cornucopia of other coldhearted entities who solely exist so that we may not. Everything is bad for you."

"My organs are indestructible."

"In rock, 'progressive' doesn't mean writing about the future; it means writing about a past that never happened."

"...sometimes the difference between self-actualization and self-amusement is less than you think."

"Q: How do you make fifty goth kids sprint across Disneyland?
A: Put up a sign that says 'Smoking Section.'"

"There have been countless occasions when I've listened to a song and imagined what its words and sounds were supposed to represent, and I inevitably perceive each element to be complex and subtle and conscious. However, when the songwriter eventually explains his thought process during the music's creation, I often realize that (a) the musician barely cares what the song is supposed to mean, and that (b) I've actually invested more intellectual energy into the song than the goddamn artist."

"Sometimes you can't find the meaning behind a metaphor because there is no metaphor."

"This wasn't even like shooting fish in a barrel; this was like shooting fish in a barrel of Vaseline."

"If you're willing to pay for fake conversation, no one's going to stop you."

"Whats weirder: admitting that you're crazy, or always pretending that you are not?"

"I write about dead people. A lot. However, I always seem to end up writing about how certain individuals' deaths inadvertently reflect some abstract trend in society they never consciously embodied."

"...it really doesn't matter what you do artistically, nor does it matter how many people like what you create; what matters is who likes what you do artistically and what liking that art is supposed to say about who you are."

"The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people."

"Choice makes us depressed.
We just don't realize it."

"There will never again be 'cultural knowledge' that everybody knows, mostly because there is simply too much culture to know about."

"In the present tense, we always want the maximum number of alternatives; in the short term, choice improves our lives, and we're completely aware of that. The problematic rub is that--over time--choice isolates us. We have fewer shared experiences, and that makes us feel alone. The proliferation of choice makes us feel vaguely alienated, and that makes us depressed. But this relationship is not something we're conscious of, because it seems crazy to attribute loneliness to freedom. We just think we're inexplicably less happy than we should be."


"Americans tend to be conspiracy theorists, but they're not particularly skeptical."

"Every woman I've ever known has at least one close friend whose only purpose in life is to criticize their actions, compete for men's attention, and drive them insane; very often, this is a woman's best friend."

"Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable."

"Prepare to have your paradigm shifted..."

"As I grow older, I find myself less prone to have an opinion about anything, and to distrust just about everyone who does. Whenever I meet someone who openly identifies themselves as a Republican or a Democrat, my immediate thought is always, Well, this person might be interesting, but they'll never say anything about politics that's remotely useful to me. I refuse to discuss abortion with anyone who is pro-life or pro-choice; I refuse to discuss affirmative action with any unemployed white guy or any unemployed black guy. All the world's stupidest people are either zealots or atheists. If you want to truly deduce how intelligent someone is, just as this person how they feel about any issue that doesn't have an answer; the more certainty they express, the less sense they have. This is because certainty only comes from dogma."

"Life is fucking confusing. I don't know anything, and neither do you."

"It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it."

"There's always this peculiar disconnect between how people exist in the world and how they think the world is supposed to exist; it's almost as if Americans can't accept an important truth about being alive. And this is the truth to which I refer: culture can't be wrong. That doesn't mean it's always 'right,' nor does it mean you always have to agree with it. But culture is never wrong. People can be wrong, and movements can be wrong. But culture--as a whole--cannot be wrong. Culture is just there."

"When people cheat, it has almost nothing to do with who they're with or who they potentially want; it just has to do with whether they view their fidelity as a realistic way to exist."

"I wasn't seducing them in any real context. I was simply eroding their morality."

"...if this were 1904, you would not be reading this essay; you would be chopping wood or churning butter or watching one of your thirteen children perish from crib death. Your life would be horrible, but your life would have purpose. It would have clarity. Machines allow humans the privilege of existential anxiety. Machines provide us with the extra time to worry about the status of our careers, and/or the context of our sexual relationships, and/or what it means to be alive. Unconsciously, we hate technology. We hate the way it replaces visceral experience with self-absorption."

"Modernity has created a cosmic difference between intellect and action, even when both are driven by the same motives..."

"Security has a way of making philosophy irrelevant, and anyone who disagrees is either a liar or a tenured professor."

"This idea seems unspeakably brilliant to me, and I honestly can't believe I'm the only person who ever got high and came up with it."

"If I were an adult, I would be drinking coffee; as it is, I'm drinking Mountain Dew"

"There are many things that PCP does to your brain, but it mainly serves to convince you that you're not high enough."

"Like all geniuses, I don't work before noon."

"It's kind of like drunk driving: every time I suspect I'm too drunk to operate my car and I ask someone else for a ride. it really means I can probably make it home on my own; whenever I'm sober enough to worry about dying or going to jail, I'm obviously not very drunk. However, whenever I'm too fucked up to do anything (drive, light a cigarette, masturbate, etc.), I inevitably crawl behind the wheel of my car and drive home alone, sometimes (ahem) 'erratically.' This is why I still can't understand how Alcoholics Anonymous is supposed to work. If the first step to recovery is 'realizing there's a problem' . . . well, if you realize it, it can't be much of a problem, can it?"

"I figure I have fifty minutes to get fucked up, plus or minus three hundred seconds. Time for three drinks, maybe. The first glass goes down like a handful of liquid thistles, but the second is smooth as a gravy avalanche and the third literally disappears from the glass that contains it."

"I suppose that's poetic, but it's certainly not getting me any drunker."

"People love metaphors, and so do I. If given the opportunity, I will try to compare anything to something else, even if they're only marginally related."