Walter Kirn

“Though I no longer liked him or respected him, the thought of his disapproval frightened me.”

— Walter Kirn

I've come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize.

— Walter Kirn

It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.

— Walter Kirn

“The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely.”

— Walter Kirn

“Reliving his degradation had struck some spark in him and it was glowing now like a blown-on coal.”

— Walter Kirn

“truth from him, is a swan dive through a mirror into a whirlpool.”

— Walter Kirn

“This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support…

— Walter Kirn

Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting.

— Walter Kirn

“Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth’s total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and…

— Walter Kirn

Everyone his own cinematographer. His own stream-of-consciousness e-mail poet. His own nightclub DJ. His own political columnist. His own biographer of his…

— Walter Kirn

I like to think that I could praise the good book of someone I personally dislike. I try not to comment on…

— Walter Kirn

Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a…

— Walter Kirn

According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad - so crudely conceived, despicably motivated…

— Walter Kirn

We want to believe that we're invulnerable, and that people who get tricked deserve it. Well, they don't. And someday the arrogant…

— Walter Kirn

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level,…

— Walter Kirn

I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and…

— Walter Kirn

I read somewhere once that in the 1960s, fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more…

— Walter Kirn

The success that Americans are said to worship is success of a specific sort: accomplished not through hard work, primarily, but through…

— Walter Kirn

I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a…

— Walter Kirn

The reason that last-ditch political maneuvering has become business as usual in Washington is that the actors involved are drunk on blame…

— Walter Kirn

One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on…

— Walter Kirn

realized that at a level I'd never been conscious we'd been engaged in a game of wits for years. I suppose most…

— Walter Kirn

No matter how you cut them, paste them, rotate them, or distort them, lip syncing and air-guitar playing are fundamentally foolish activities,…

— Walter Kirn

Since the founding of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other mainstays of what technology writers have come to call 'the social Web' or…

— Walter Kirn

“His voice sounded more sincere in these surroundings, less distorted by pride and pain.”

— Walter Kirn

Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it.

— Walter Kirn

“You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby”

— Walter Kirn

What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?

— Walter Kirn

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

— Walter Kirn

“Sometimes I wondered if my problem was liking too many different kinds of”

— Walter Kirn

In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth..

— Walter Kirn

“They were gray, staring, bottomless, blank, fallen eyes whose pupils played scenes of heaven upside down.”

— Walter Kirn

Stopping to think is fine for characters, but not for their creators. They have to work.

— Walter Kirn

“He looked like a being who'd voyaged back through time from a world that had overcome illness, pain, and conflict.”

— Walter Kirn

You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.

— Walter Kirn

“Their throat muscles shifted sharply when they spoke, as if separately manufacturing each word.”

— Walter Kirn

“Meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far.”

— Walter Kirn

“This was all our world was made of: decomposed visions. Not atoms --- bits of dreams.”

— Walter Kirn

“She's everything I wanted when I was young and everything I distrust now that I'm not.”

— Walter Kirn

“people, including types that I didn’t like much at all but felt I had something to learn or to gain from.”

— Walter Kirn