Walter Kirn Quotes

Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.

— Walter Kirn

“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 retarded at random intervals.”

— Walter Kirn

“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 work, not line-dance through the parks.”

— Walter Kirn

“Love is a powerful painkiller.”

— Walter Kirn

“Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth's total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism.”

— Walter Kirn

“Frustration comes from fighting your own momentum.”

— Walter Kirn

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.”

— Walter Kirn

“Liars are exhausting people.”

— Walter Kirn

“She's everything I wanted when I was young and everything I distrust now that I'm not.”

— Walter Kirn

“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 minimize it, than point it out and cause the liar embarassment?”

— Walter Kirn

“Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting.”

— Walter Kirn

“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, and they tend to just quietly go away.”

— Walter Kirn

“I've come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize.”

— Walter Kirn

“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 I like to gorge on them now and then.”

— Walter Kirn

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.

— Walter Kirn

“I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that this was going on and I hadn't known about it before. I was flabbergasted.”

— Walter Kirn

“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 person of which I was a typical specimen: the mental contortionist, able to rise to almost every challenge placed before him, except the challenge of real self-knowledge.”

— Walter Kirn

“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 an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.”

— Walter Kirn

We're on Twitter with one side of our personality, and Facebook with another, and LinkedIn with another side of our personality, and we're toggling between them. That's just a version of what an impostor does: shifting from one side of their personality to another with lightning speed.

— Walter Kirn

“Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out.”

— Walter Kirn

“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 covers.”

— Walter Kirn

“Realize that the game of life is the game of, to some extent, being taken advantage of by people who make a science of it. Whether they are in government or personal life or in business, they're everywhere.”

— Walter Kirn

“A loving mother-son relationship is always a plot or outwitting of some kind. 'Don't tell anyone, but ... ' my mother was always saying to me - when I wasn't saying it to her.”

— Walter Kirn

“Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy.”

— Walter Kirn

“The least sexy city is Los Angeles. And it poses as the most sexy. As you grow up, L.A. is being sold to you as home of the bikini-clad party girls. And then you get there, and it's full of very goal-oriented, yoga-obsessed careerists.”

— Walter Kirn

“I read somewhere once that in the 1960s, fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more sensational than made-up stories could ever hope to be. Our new problem - more profound, I think - is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact.”

— Walter Kirn

“A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.”

— Walter Kirn

“At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.”

— Walter Kirn

“My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer ... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.”

— Walter Kirn

“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.”

— Walter Kirn

Stopping to think is fine for characters, but not for their creators. They have to work.

— Walter Kirn

“Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.”

— Walter Kirn

Guns can turn you into an insider even if you're an outsider by nature, recruiting you into a loose fraternity of people who feel embattled and defensive and are primally eager to win allies.

— Walter Kirn

When I shoot at the range, I don't feel personally powerful but like the custodian of something powerful. I feel like a successful disciplinarian of something radically alien and potent. Analyze this sensation all you want; you still can't make it go away.

— Walter Kirn

“I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.”

— Walter Kirn

“Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.”

— Walter Kirn

“Thanks to Twitter, iPads, BlackBerrys, voice-activated in-dash navigation systems, and a hundred other technologies that offer distraction anywhere, anytime, boredom has loosened its grip on us at last - that once-crushing 'weight' has become, for the most part, a memory.”

— Walter Kirn

Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.

— Walter Kirn

“I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.”

— Walter Kirn

On the Web, we can be whoever we wish to be, editing the face we show to others in ways that aren't possible in physical space. We can also fine-tune the complexity and depth of our interactions and relationships.

— Walter Kirn

“One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading.”

— Walter Kirn

“Central Wyoming was like hell without the flames, an underworld thrust up onto the surface.”

— Walter Kirn

I could see tall ideas standing up behind his eyes.

— Walter Kirn

We're a telephone family, strung out along the wires, sharing our news in loops and daisy chains. We don't meet face-to-face much, and when we do there's a dematerialized feeling, as though only half of our molecules are present.

— Walter Kirn

“This was all our world was made of: decomposed visions. Not atoms
bits of dreams.”

— Walter Kirn

“Leslie Titmuss bothered me. His name, it made me want to sneeze. I also thought I recognized it. I typed it into my laptop, a procedure that had lately held far too much suspense for me. Among the top results the search returned was a page from GoodReads, a literary website.”

— Walter Kirn

've always defined a truly alluring story as a journey we're not equipped to take ourselves with a person we're tempted but afraid to emulate. Impostor narratives are exactly that. When they end in disaster, as Clark's did, or as Gatsby's did, we can congratulate ourselves for our own wisdom. We can also experience, safely, at no cost, the terrible thrill of radical self-invention, of trading who we are for who we might be.

— Walter Kirn

“The market is the only critic that matters.”

— Walter Kirn

Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.

— Walter Kirn

“You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.”

— Walter Kirn