Walter Kirn Quotes

51 quotes in 916 categories

• Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.
• The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.
• Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?
• Some strangers become more important to you than family, maybe because you're not expected to love them. You can leave them whenever you want to.…
• Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.
• A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
• In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth..
• At the beginning of a novel, a writer needs confidence, but after that what's required is persistence. These traits sound similar. They aren't. Confidence is…
• Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us…
• Most writers' view of the New West is either phony - obsessed with the same tired mythology - or it's obsessed with anti-mythology, ... There's…
• The market is the only critic that matters.
• The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
• I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their…
• He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting…
• Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
• When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
• My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New…
• To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
• Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
• Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat,…

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