It's possible this whole "Why do Latinos love Morrisey?" question will haunt us forever. Fortunately Canadian academics are on the case.
As an adult the only people who care about horror movies are academics. No one loves to talk about horror films more than somebody with a Ph.D. in cultural studies at a university.
That's like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths.
Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.
People can demand someone they've never met be arrested and thrown in jail forever because they know it's never going to happen and they're never going to see this person.
When I think about the future I'm not necessarily arguing it's going to be better or worse. I'm just saying it's going to be different.
We argued about how hard it would be to ride a bear assuming said bear was muzzled.
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.
But it goes without saying that Michael Jordan could never date Pamela Anderson. That would cause the apocalypse.
Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they're honest about everything.
I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity mostly because they're all so envious of it.
The things he did on purpose were usually no different from the mistakes he made by accident.
Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?
It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.
Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives.
Art and love are the same thing: Itâ??s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
Somewhere at some point somehow somebody decided that death equals credibility.
I would hate for climate change to be accepted simply because everyone was dying.
Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons but they will never be the athletic ruling class.
I doubt that pornography has been good for the advancement of society but I suspect itâ??s done wonders for the advancement of computer technology.
It's possible for me to imagine a generation of people maybe two generations removed from you who might decide that we have an adversarial relationship with technology.
It seems as though our ability to change technology happens so quickly and our ability to evolve as creatures is still very slow.
Important things are inevitably cliche but nobody wants to admit that.
I am ready to be alone.
Mostly we argued about who which of us was better at arguing and particularly about who had won the previous argument.
I'm really an alarmist when it comes to epidemics. Swine flu now; when SARS was big I was all freaked out about that bird flu. That terrifies me.
Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music.
Technology evolves faster than people do faster than biology does.
Styx and The Stones may break my bones but 'More than Words' will never hurt me
If Donald Trump loses badly it could mean the end of the GOP as one of the two significant parties.
As of right now I am in love with her and that love is the biggest problem in my life.
Unless you're Shannon Hoon (of Blind Melon) dying is the only thing that guarantees a rock star will have a legacy that stretches beyond temporary relevance.
...he was forty bushels beyond bamboozled.
Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.
Saying you like "Piano Man" doesn't mean you like Billy Joel; it means you're willing to go to a piano bar if there's nothing else to do
Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.
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.
Flying to me isn't scary it's just incredibly boring. And I guess I have a fear of boredom so in that regard I'm afraid to fly.
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 baseball and sex cliches are usually true: pitching beats hitting and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn't seem to care.
Soccer is like punk rock: The product is not necessarily terrible. The problem is the fan base.
...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.
Every time I learn the truth about something Iâ??m disappointed
Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.
Being a sexual icon is sort of like being the front man for an Orange County punk band: As soon as you can explain why you're necessary you're over.
I almost never get lonely. I love being alone. I'm glad I'm married and I love my wife. But there's never been a situation in my life where my unhappiness was based on loneliness.
I'm good at being by myself. I guess if you're a writer you get used to that.
The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.
and I spilled gravy on my Carolina sweater because I am alive
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.
Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.
We all believe that we are a certain kind of person but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise or until we die.
Every generation is more influenced by technology which is always changing faster.
It is very easy for me to imagine in 200 years people looking back at chemotherapy as proof that people of the 20th century were insane and just morons.
Texting has become my favorite way to communicate. I feel like many of my relationships are based in this because in a sense it feels the closest to actual conversation that isn't the phone.
We are often wrong about the past but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.
If you stare long enough at anything you will start to find similarities. The word â??coincidenceâ? exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.
Maybe I could survive in one of those resort prisons where they house white-collar criminals. I've always wanted to get better at tennis.
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.
Perhaps we humans are still in command and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in the not-so-distant future. If so let's roll.
I think this is the kind of thing where we're rapidly moving toward an age where most of the populace will be almost unable to imagine life without an Internet component interlocked with it.
I think people's relationship with the concept of violence changes and that to me might be a little more interesting.
Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know the less we are able to feel.
Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.
[On political correctness:] Any intended message mattered less than the received message and every received message could be interpreted in whatever way the receiver wanted.
In some ways Halloween is much easier for women. They can just dress as sluts and it's kind of a costume if they never do any other time.
The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.
If I'm around spiders my fear isn't so much the spider but my fear is that I'm somewhere rustic and that spiders are crawling around. I must be in the woods.
The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.
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.
If rain is God crying I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus.
It doesn't matter what you can do if you don't know why you're doing it.
This is what being alive feels like you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.
When I'm walking around I'm usually drinking pop so I can't have a mask on. That's why I couldn't be a surgeon.
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.
Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss I decide to eat lunch.
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.
Weâ??re all tourists sort of. Life is tourism sort of. As far as Iâ??m concerned the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock.
The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality
When given the choice weâ??d all rather be happy now â?¦ even if that guarantees weâ??ll all be sad later.
Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.
We all eventually become whatever we pretend to hate.
It feels so exhausting to be so bad at something I loved so much.
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 Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.
I tend to equate sadness with intelligence.
First you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough others will love you too much.
Maybe it takes forty years of your life to understand how the world seems to work.
Instead we were given a publication called the Weekly Reader which was like a newspaper for four-foot illiterates.
The falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was.
I want fake love. But that's all I want and that's why I can't have it.
In the Far East it's very normal for people to wear masks in flu season. I don't know if I'd ever do that though because I don't like having things on my face.
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).
The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.
Science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people.
Because I'm 44 I feel kind of lucky that I lived through this period where I started my career where there was no Internet at all and now when I finish it there will be nothing but the Internet.
If you don't have a job you don't have a fear of losing it. You fear having to get one.
The last girl I love will be someone I havenâ??t even met yet probably.
Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.
Without a soundtrack human interaction is meaningless.
You're trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview.
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.
If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.
It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.
I once loved a girl who almost loved me but not as much as she loved John Cusack.
You can't go into the office and be a jerk. You can't yell at your kids or your wife or your husband for no reason. That makes you a terrible person.
Everybody is wrong about everything just about all the time.
I care about strangers when they're abstractions but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.
It was the kind of love you can only feel toward someone you don't actually know.
Sarcasm is when you tell someone the truth by lying on purpose.
Gay marriage should be legalized in america because gay men are the only men who want to be married.
I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you plan the stereo at max volume it's almost like the other people can't see into your vehicle. It tints your windows somehow.
People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves theyâ??d never admit in normal conversation.
In and of itself nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.
In New York people are unhappy on purpose because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington DC it just sort of works out that way.
The reason that people in the intellectual community argue that football is dangerous is because there's now a large swath of society that has no relationship to physicality or potential violence.
If you can't swim the idea of being in nine feet of water is terrifying much less the ocean.
The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.' People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.
It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.
Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not- even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian- it's only a matter of time.
I like storms. I would say I actively like stormy weather. I would not be afraid of them. I think that if I had not pursued journalism I think storm-chasing would've been a really fun career.