Chuck Klosterman Quotes

What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.

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 the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

I love art, but I'm not an academic; I just like what I like.

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.

I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.

How can you say when you're attracted to something? It's not easy to articulate my tastes.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate.

I don't know why people see the things that they do. I wouldn't pay to see them, they don't touch me or move me in any way.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

A great work of art is one that truly moves and inspires you. You yourself must be moved. Don't look at art with others' eyes. Don't listen to music with others' ears. You must react to art with your own feelings, your own heart and mind.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

Music is an experience, not a science.

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. I say this as someone who would rather read comics than watch movies, listen to music, anything. But it's not an operatic medium. I hear other people talk about being moved to tears by comics. I can't imagine that.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!