Top 100 Walter Kirn Quotes
#1. Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.
Walter Kirn
#2. Our habit of wishing backward from what is to what might have been is the soft but persistent tapping that cracks the crystal.
Walter Kirn
#3. The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
Walter Kirn
#4. My mother used to push 'Wuthering Heights' on me as a boy, and I sensed from her breathy description of the story that it would make me laugh. I have no plans to find out if this is true.
Walter Kirn
#5. Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.
Walter Kirn
#6. People can be so neglectful of each other and of their own heritage - then death intrudes. Conversations we wish that we'd had earlier are had too late.
Walter Kirn
#7. No matter how you cut them, paste them, rotate them, or distort them, lip syncing and air-guitar playing are fundamentally foolish activities, and anyone seen to be engaging in them with anything approaching a straight face is, by definition, taking herself or himself much too seriously.
Walter Kirn
#8. Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy.
Walter Kirn
#9. Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.
Walter Kirn
#10. I sensed the presence of wizened bachelor potters working in sheds behind their mothers' houses.
Walter Kirn
#11. In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.
Walter Kirn
#13. She was already dead, but we were starved for followers and stupefied by the elixir of our own heroism, and so we pretended words could resurrect her.
Walter Kirn
#14. A sociopath doesn't warm up their environment, doesn't make it cozy. They don't have to; when they're not performing, when they're not manipulating, when they're all alone, there's nothing.
Walter Kirn
#15. We're a telephone family, strung out along the wires, sharing our news in loops and daisy chains. We don't meet face-to-face much, and when we do there's a dematerialized feeling, as though only half of our molecules are present.
Walter Kirn
#16. When I was writing about the Republican primaries, it was as though the Bible was a black box that people reached into to pull out edicts and prejudices and rules and opinions, and I wish they had fact-checked it! Especially Rick Santorum.
Walter Kirn
#17. The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and their own gullibility, and they tend to just quietly go away.
Walter Kirn
#18. This was all our world was made of: decomposed visions. Not atoms
bits of dreams.
Walter Kirn
#19. He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.
Walter Kirn
#21. The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I'll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth's curvature allows. It's a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it all in at one, why move?
Walter Kirn
#22. To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your "Core Attachments," means apologizing for your very existence.
Walter Kirn
#23. It's the little deceptions that no one catches that are going to dissolve it all someday. We'll look at clocks and we won't believe the hands. They'll forecast sun but we'll pack our slickers anyway.
Walter Kirn
#24. Men who turn their faith into a business owe all of us a steak dinner now and then.
Walter Kirn
#25. His thoughts were clearly still shoving him further away, toward some ultimate dark drama that he might or might not have actually lived through but whose telling would let out the pressure inside his skull.
Walter Kirn
#26. Thanks to Twitter, iPads, BlackBerrys, voice-activated in-dash navigation systems, and a hundred other technologies that offer distraction anywhere, anytime, boredom has loosened its grip on us at last - that once-crushing 'weight' has become, for the most part, a memory.
Walter Kirn
#27. Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act.
Walter Kirn
#28. Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.
Walter Kirn
#29. We're on Twitter with one side of our personality, and Facebook with another, and LinkedIn with another side of our personality, and we're toggling between them. That's just a version of what an impostor does: shifting from one side of their personality to another with lightning speed.
Walter Kirn
#30. If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
Walter Kirn
#31. I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
Walter Kirn
#32. Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
Walter Kirn
#33. In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.
Walter Kirn
#34. I could see tall ideas standing up behind his eyes.
Walter Kirn
#35. Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.
Walter Kirn
#36. I like to think that I could praise the good book of someone I personally dislike. I try not to comment on the person, to be insulting, but I have no trouble being insulting to the work.
Walter Kirn
#37. Meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far.
Walter Kirn
#38. I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.
Walter Kirn
#39. The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
Walter Kirn
#40. Central Wyoming was like hell without the flames, an underworld thrust up onto the surface.
Walter Kirn
#41. You're able to do things in novels: introduce subplots, other characters, thematic layers and so on, in a way that you simply can't in a movie. A movie really has to choose its battles.
Walter Kirn
#42. The least sexy city is Los Angeles. And it poses as the most sexy. As you grow up, L.A. is being sold to you as home of the bikini-clad party girls. And then you get there, and it's full of very goal-oriented, yoga-obsessed careerists.
Walter Kirn
#43. I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small, tasty delights, and I like to gorge on them now and then.
Walter Kirn
#44. I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.
Walter Kirn
#45. What is it in people, or just in people like me, that would rather let a lie go by, would rather wish it away or minimize it, than point it out and cause the liar embarassment?
Walter Kirn
#46. I say 'here's the thing' a lot, both to alert people that I'm about to say something important and to give myself a moment to figure out what that important thing might be, because my head is so often completely empty.
Walter Kirn
#47. You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.
Walter Kirn
#48. It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
Walter Kirn
#49. We want to believe that we're invulnerable, and that people who get tricked deserve it. Well, they don't. And someday the arrogant types who mock the gullible are likely to get their turn to wear the dunce cap.
Walter Kirn
#50. In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.'
Walter Kirn
#52. The room-service Caesar salads with soggy croutons, the distant relatives who show up at readings pitching weird, far-fetched investment schemes, the fans who have you sign a book to 'Cathy' and then tell you, 'No, it's Kathy with a K' - it gets challenging after a while. It tests your stamina.
Walter Kirn
#53. You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby
Walter Kirn
#54. This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.
Walter Kirn
#55. Realized that at a level I'd never been conscious we'd been engaged in a game of wits for years. I suppose most writer-subject pairings are like that. Of course, I'd set aside my plan to write about him [Clark Rockfeller] as soon as I'd gotten to know him some, but now I'd resumed that intention.
Walter Kirn
#56. God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast?
Walter Kirn
#57. When I shoot at the range, I don't feel personally powerful but like the custodian of something powerful. I feel like a successful disciplinarian of something radically alien and potent. Analyze this sensation all you want; you still can't make it go away.
Walter Kirn
#58. Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.
Walter Kirn
#59. In a world that's smarter than it used to be and, in some ways, smarter than it ought to be, stupidity has a way of making us seem all the more human.
Walter Kirn
#60. Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out.
Walter Kirn
#61. Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to add to it unless you have a damn good reason.
Walter Kirn
#62. It's been a concern of mine for years that the mainstream media coverage of culture and politics takes place in two nodes, Washington and New York, and yet all the voting goes on somewhere else.
Walter Kirn
#63. Leslie Titmuss bothered me. His name, it made me want to sneeze. I also thought I recognized it. I typed it into my laptop, a procedure that had lately held far too much suspense for me. Among the top results the search returned was a page from GoodReads, a literary website.
Walter Kirn
#64. We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.
Walter Kirn
#65. When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
Walter Kirn
#66. The fictionally correct have all the answers, and that's what's wrong with them. They're artistic technocrats. There's no dilemma so knotty, no question so baffling, that it can't be smoothly neutralized by dialing up the right attitude adjustment. Poor old Hemingway. If only he'd known.
Walter Kirn
#67. I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.
Walter Kirn
#68. I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone.
Walter Kirn
#69. On the Web, we can be whoever we wish to be, editing the face we show to others in ways that aren't possible in physical space. We can also fine-tune the complexity and depth of our interactions and relationships.
Walter Kirn
#70. The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.
Walter Kirn
#71. I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.
Walter Kirn
#72. The jurors appear vaguely stranded and at loose ends, uprooted from their routines and livelihoods.
Walter Kirn
#73. If I had to pick between knowing just a little about a lot of folks and knowing everything about a few, I'd opt for the long, wide-angle shot, I think.
Walter Kirn
#74. Cross the wrong state border with your gun, or wake up one morning to new legislation or a new presidential executive order, and suddenly you're the bad guy, not the good guy. No wonder some gun owners seem so touchy; they feel, at some level, like criminals in waiting.
Walter Kirn
#75. I grew up in a little town in Minnesota, 500 people. I went out to Princeton, and I wasn't very well-accepted out there by the fancy folks of Princeton University, I felt. I came away bruised and feeling rejected.
Walter Kirn
#76. The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely.
Walter Kirn
#77. Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
Walter Kirn
#78. Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.
Walter Kirn
#79. I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
Walter Kirn
#80. They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required.
Walter Kirn
#81. The market is the only critic that matters.
Walter Kirn
#82. The idea that Americans favor politicians who either remind them of themselves or can imagine what their selves are like because they too have struggled and sung the blues, is, like very best theories of human behavior, immune to falsification by mere evidence.
Walter Kirn
#83. Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth's total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism.
Walter Kirn
#84. [T]he anti-vitriol vitriol is getting ugly.
Walter Kirn
#85. I'd assumed that a deal was a deal when Princeton admitted me, but I was wrong. The price of getting in - to the university itself, and to the great world it promised to open up - was an endless dunning for nebulous services that weren't included in the initial quote.
Walter Kirn
#86. Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting.
Walter Kirn
#87. What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
Walter Kirn
#88. If writers, like comedians or singers, could only hear themselves bombing as they worked, it's likely that certain books would be cut short after the first few leaden sentences.
Walter Kirn
#89. Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it.
Walter Kirn
#90. I've come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize.
Walter Kirn
#91. Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
Walter Kirn
#92. There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.
Walter Kirn
#93. My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer ... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.
Walter Kirn
#94. Since the founding of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other mainstays of what technology writers have come to call 'the social Web' or 'Web 2.0,' a sizable portion of humanity has learned to be together while apart, sacrificing intimacy for control and spontaneity for predictability.
Walter Kirn
#95. The future of time, of how it's won or lost, endured or enjoyed, expanded or compressed, will depend on how it's valued, not how it's measured.
Walter Kirn
#96. Good short-story collections, like good record albums, are almost always hit-and-miss affairs - successful if they include three or four great tracks, wildly successful if they have five. And that's as it should be.
Walter Kirn
#97. According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad - so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed - that they're actually rather good.
Walter Kirn
#98. E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.
Walter Kirn
#99. There are two sides to me. One is the writer. That's a savage person who looks at everything as a story and, you know, wants to use real life in his books. The other part is the Midwesterner, who, you know, wants to say nice things about people and be polite.
Walter Kirn
#100. I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.
Walter Kirn
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