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...

…he was forty bushels beyond bamboozled.

When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago–and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail–it’s disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They...

Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is...

Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.

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

It’s natural to think of one’s own life as a novel (or a movie or a play), and within that narrative we are always the central character. Thoughtful people try to overcome this compulsion, but...

Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

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.

There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of...

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...

Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993. However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet...

Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.

I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.

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.

421Life is fucking confusing. I don’t know anything, and neither do you.

But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don’t have ways to quantify ideas like “amazing” or “successful” or “lovable” without the feedback of an...

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...

It’s far easier to write why something is terrible than why it’s good. If you’re reviewing a film and you decide “This is a movie I don’t like,” basically you can take every element of...

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

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

Life is fucking confusing. I don’t know anything, and neither do you.

Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.

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...

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

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...

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

[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.

Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.

I found him completely dishonest and totally likable, because he doesn’t care.

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.

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...

If you’ve spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you’ve probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this!...

…because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation. It’s a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.

And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess...

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

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).

Do you know people who insist they like ‘all kinds of music’? That actually means they like no kinds of music.

Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. (In an 1858 debate, he flatly insisted that he had no intention of abolishing slavery...

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...

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that’s not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion....

As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn’t own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don’t own a TV simply means...

…his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.

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...

The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued.

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,...

Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from...

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop...

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our...

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