If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
There are two sides to me. One is the writer. That's a savage person who looks at everything as a story and,… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
I like to think that I could praise the good book of someone I personally dislike. I try not to comment on… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad - so crudely conceived, despicably motivated… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
At the beginning of a novel, a writer needs confidence, but after that what's required is persistence. These traits sound similar. They… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
There are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Here's how adaptation works - almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as though the… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious,… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
You're able to do things in novels: introduce subplots, other characters, thematic layers and so on, in a way that you simply… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small,… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
If writers, like comedians or singers, could only hear themselves bombing as they worked, it's likely that certain books would be cut… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
The room-service Caesar salads with soggy croutons, the distant relatives who show up at readings pitching weird, far-fetched investment schemes, the fans… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted. — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
“I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
It's no accident that most self-help groups use 'anonymous' in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
“For time to pass it would have to go somewhere, and where would that be? Time sits. We move, it sits. Sometimes it trembles… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to add to… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
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,… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen,… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
The idea that Americans favor politicians who either remind them of themselves or can imagine what their selves are like because they too have… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends? — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
People can be so neglectful of each other and of their own heritage - then death intrudes. Conversations we wish that we'd had earlier… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
