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
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 grew up in a little town in Minnesota, 500 people. I went out to Princeton, and I wasn't very well-accepted out… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it. — 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
Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,'… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
My mother used to push 'Wuthering Heights' on me as a boy, and I sensed from her breathy description of the story… — 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
When I was writing about the Republican primaries, it was as though the Bible was a black box that people reached into… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
I say 'here's the thing' a lot, both to alert people that I'm about to say something important and to give myself… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday'… — 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
