Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it. — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
Guns can turn you into an insider even if you're an outsider by nature, recruiting you into a loose fraternity of people… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast? — 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
The idea that Americans favor politicians who either remind them of themselves or can imagine what their selves are like because they… — 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
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
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
Realize that the game of life is the game of, to some extent, being taken advantage of by people who make a… — Walter Kirn Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Statistics on the dangers guns pose to the health of their owners and those who live with them suggest that I'd be… — 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
