"Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else."
— Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)

"Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture."
— Chuck Klosterman (Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas)

"In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.
"
— Chuck Klosterman

"Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they're honest about everything. "
— Chuck Klosterman

"Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

""There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don't realize it." "
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."
— Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)

"Internet porn makes everything more reasonable -- once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy."
— Chuck Klosterman

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

"Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"It was the kind of love you can only feel toward someone you don't actually know."
— Chuck Klosterman (Downtown Owl: A Novel)

"Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"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. "
— Chuck Klosterman

"I doubt that pornography has been good for the advancement of society, but I suspect it’s done wonders for the advancement of computer technology."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"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 (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"I am ready to be alone."
— Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)

"Being interesting has been replaced with being identifiable"
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"The falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was."
— Chuck Klosterman (Downtown Owl: A Novel)