"Record sales don't matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone."

"History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining."

"Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite."

"Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water)."

"If you play 'I Don't Want To Know' by Fleetwood Mac loud enough - you can hear Lindsey Buckingham's fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar. ...And we were convinced that this was the definitive illustration of what we both loved about music; we loved hearing the INSIDE of a song."

"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."

"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)."

"If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?"

"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."

"It's just that what's important there is different there than what's important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media."

"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."

"If you're doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you're not going to have a relationship with them, they're not going to like you, they're not going to be your friend."

"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."

"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."

"A whole bunch of months passed and I didn't hear anything and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age."

"Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, 'That would certainly make everything easier, even though I can't think of one person who'd qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson."

"I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it."

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

"The future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along."

"It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names."

"The increasingly common ideology that assures people they're right about what they believe. is, however, socially detrimental . It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be."

"And if something is only itself, it doesn't particularly matter."

"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."

"The desire to be cool is-ultimately-the desire to be rescued."

"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."

"Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans."

"The deeper reality is that I'm not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I'm certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel? There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There's probably a third level, too-how I want to think I feel."

"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."

"Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect."

"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."

"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."

"The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is midly zen. There are public road signs that say 'Gusty Winds May Exist'. This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice."

"But the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along."

"TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder ceiling."

"We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths."

"We're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing."

"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."

"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."

"The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too."

"It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn."

"In Fargo, they say, well, that's a job. How well do you get paid? For example, for this book I was written about in Entertainment Weekly, and it was kind of cool because my mom asked me if Entertainment Weekly was a magazine or a newspaper."

"Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool."

"The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life."

"We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time."

"If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus."

"We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex."

"However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they're selling nostalgia, which means they're selling my own memories back to me, which means they're selling me to me."

"The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time."

"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different."