Chuck Klosterman Quotes

Pop music will never be low brow.

One meaningful distinction between high and popular culture, is that there's way more good popular culture - because its standards of quality are more forgiving, because sobriety isn't its default mode, because there's so damn much of it.

People want to make a distinction between what's commercial and what's art.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

One of my gripes about movies is that people take them so seriously, and the moneymaking aspects are so brutal.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

The demarcation between an art house film and an entertainer has blurred, only because a larger section of the audience has accepted such realistic films.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.

I don't take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache.

Not every programme dealing with issues of global significance has to be fronted by last week's winner of Have I Got News For You-but I suppose you might be wrong.

I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.

Art should be witty, like a good Eddie Murphy movie, to make your life a little easier and better.

Pop culture is great, but it can be bad, at times.

I don't think 'Cocktail' was a perfect critical success, but it touched a vein in our culture.

I've never bought a Dylan record. A singing poet? It just bores me to tears. I've got to tell you, if I had 10 Dylans in the final of 'American Idol,' we would not be getting 30 million viewers a week. I don't believe the Bob Dylans of this world would make 'American Idol 'a better show.

I don't think it's an unnatural thing at all for my collaborations or projects to be seen as art but entertainment at the same time.

Some people think big audiences are crass and that, say, a comedy that appeals to a wide audience is pandering. Other people would argue that you could say that about Moliere.

Musicals aren't two-dimensional froth.

I don't know why records are treated different than books. I don't know why an Eminem record is different than a Stephen King movie.

I've got lots of friends who would just think, 'Horror movies - they're crap, aren't they?' I think there's a cultural snobbery more than an institutional one.

I am hard put to think of a single positive thing that commercial Hindi cinema has achieved.

I want folks to take horror seriously.

I love Lucille Ball. But you don't call that Shakespeare. It's just entertainment, you know. And if you like that, then go have a ball, have fun.

I can't differentiate between mass and class films.

Reality TV has managed to commodify everything we used to think of as the elements of normal life.