Best Walter Kirn Quotes
- No matter how you cut them, paste them, rotate them, or distort them, lip syncing and air-guitar playing are fundamentally foolish activities, and anyone seen… Activities
- Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as… Badge
- Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides. Abide
- If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down. Boiled
- The success that Americans are said to worship is success of a specific sort: accomplished not through hard work, primarily, but through the ingenious angle,… Accomplished
- At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness. Atmosphere
- I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small, tasty delights, and… Almanacs
- Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to add to it… Add
- I like to think that I could praise the good book of someone I personally dislike. I try not to comment on the person, to… Book
- What is it in people, or just in people like me, that would rather let a lie go by, would rather wish it away or… Cause
- When I was writing about the Republican primaries, it was as though the Bible was a black box that people reached into to pull out… Bible
- God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast? Behaviors
- Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their… All
- However old-fashioned and right-wing this may sound, the American genius for language lies in understatement, in saying things simply, pointedly and quickly, and in making… American
- Novelists who pretend to understand what keeps them scribbling are really just guessing. A profound, unmet childish need to be acknowledged? Maybe. It hardly matters,… Acknowledged
- Stopping to think is fine for characters, but not for their creators. They have to work. Characters
- The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and their own gullibility,… Artists
- To young people born under the weird planet of the SAT, intelligence was equated with agility, with raw acuity. It produced a certain sort of… Able
- The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone. Alone
- There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from… Character
- You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed… Author
- Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves,… Allowing
- The reason that last-ditch political maneuvering has become business as usual in Washington is that the actors involved are drunk on blame and are convinced… Actor
- Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act. Act
- Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones… Address