Words matter. These are the best Chuck Klosterman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn’t afford a home computer – I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn’t be so bad.
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.
Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
I keep saying the word ‘weird’ over and over again, but it’s the only way I can describe it.
I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it’s based on is whether it’s good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.
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.
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 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 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.
Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they’re honest about everything.
It didn’t seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn’t know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
