Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman
Charles John "Chuck" Klostermanis an American author and essayist who has written books and essays focused on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of eight books including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 June 1972
CountryUnited States of America
This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.
I think one possibility [in the future] might be chemotherapy. And I'm always hesitant to say that because it makes it sound like I'm against chemotherapy. Right now, chemotherapy is the best cancer treatment therapy we have. But let's say we find some way where we can almost genetically engineer the DNA of our being and fight cancer that way. Then, the idea that we used to pump poison into people to fight off cancer will almost seem like the use of leeches or something.
Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.
Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.
My mind and gut are never simpatico: Every time I think somebody likes me, she doesn't; every time I think somebody doesn't like me, she does. This has never changed and I'm certain it never will.
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.
It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.
The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.
But it goes without saying that Michael Jordan could never date Pamela Anderson. That would cause the apocalypse.
I would hate for climate change to be accepted simply because everyone was dying.
Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
To me, fear of the future means fear of technology. I have a little bit of that. I still use it, but I kind of see technology as this harmful thing that's so ingrained in my life that it sort of dictates and controls my relationship with it.
Unless you're Shannon Hoon (of Blind Melon), dying is the only thing that guarantees a rock star will have a legacy that stretches beyond temporary relevance.
I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.