Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

by Chuck Klosterman

It is more lucrative to write about why things are good than about why things are bad, chiefly because the former is so much more complicated than the latter.

It’s easy to understand why Franzen’s literary characters are so rich and fully realized; he understands himself better than most people I’ve encountered, which is always the first step toward understanding people who aren’t you.

it’s better to have one person love you than to have ten people like you. It’s very easy to like someone’s work, and it doesn’t mean that much; you can like something for a year and just as easily forget it was ever there to begin with. But people remember the things they love. They psychologically invest in those things, and they use them to define their life