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
Novelists who pretend to understand what keeps them scribbling are really just guessing. A profound, unmet childish need to be acknowledged? Maybe.… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
What is it in people, or just in people like me, that would rather let a lie go by, would rather wish… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and… — 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've been around - having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that - some pretty fancy characters in my… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
We're on Twitter with one side of our personality, and Facebook with another, and LinkedIn with another side of our personality, and… — 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
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
