It's no accident that most self-help groups use 'anonymous' in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
However old-fashioned and right-wing this may sound, the American genius for language lies in understatement, in saying things simply, pointedly and quickly,… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
It's been a concern of mine for years that the mainstream media coverage of culture and politics takes place in two nodes,… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
The success that Americans are said to worship is success of a specific sort: accomplished not through hard work, primarily, but through… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: go to New York. And if you can't go to New York, go to… — 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
I read somewhere once that in the 1960s, fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Cross the wrong state border with your gun, or wake up one morning to new legislation or a new presidential executive order,… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways… — 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
