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"I grew up on a farm, and we didn't have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn't inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it."
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"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone."

"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."

"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."

"Whatever good things people say of us, they tell us nothing new."

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."

"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."
Explore more quotes by Chuck Klosterman

"At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice."

"The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll."

"Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available."

"A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story."

"I also did an Ozzy piece for him, and so I got hired. Everything happened really fast. I can't give people advice, because everything in my life changed completely in less than a year and it's still not something I am used to."

"The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism."

"I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story."

"To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before."

"When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day."

"The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself."
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