Walter Kirn Quotes & Sayings

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble. — Walter Kirn

It's the little deceptions that no one catches that are going to dissolve it all someday. We'll look at clocks and we won't believe the hands. They'll forecast sun but we'll pack our slickers anyway. — Walter Kirn

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too. — Walter Kirn

You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby — Walter Kirn

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

They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required. — 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

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 unless you have a damn good reason. — Walter Kirn

I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining having never been born yourself. — Walter Kirn

The idea that Americans favor politicians who either remind them of themselves or can imagine what their selves are like because they too have struggled and sung the blues, is, like very best theories of human behavior, immune to falsification by mere evidence. — Walter Kirn

When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the reader longs to be somewhere, not just anywhere, and certainly not nowhere. — Walter Kirn

I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: go to New York. And if you can't go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. — Walter Kirn

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

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, though. The termite that asks itself why it keeps chewing risks becoming sluggish and inefficient, as does the writer who grows self-conscious in the middle of chapter five. — Walter Kirn

Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it. — Walter Kirn

I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called. — Walter Kirn

The room-service Caesar salads with soggy croutons, the distant relatives who show up at readings pitching weird, far-fetched investment schemes, the fans who have you sign a book to 'Cathy' and then tell you, 'No, it's Kathy with a K' - it gets challenging after a while. It tests your stamina. — Walter Kirn

The best critic needn't be right, just interesting. — 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

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

In a world that's smarter than it used to be and, in some ways, smarter than it ought to be, stupidity has a way of making us seem all the more human. — Walter Kirn

She's everything I wanted when I was young and everything I distrust now that I'm not. — Walter Kirn

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible. — 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

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

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. They can, too. Every moment together is a choice. — Walter Kirn

E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now. — Walter Kirn

If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down. — Walter Kirn

This was all our world was made of: decomposed visions. Not atoms
bits of dreams. — Walter Kirn

Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting. — Walter Kirn

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of. — Walter Kirn

It's been a concern of mine for years that the mainstream media coverage of culture and politics takes place in two nodes, Washington and New York, and yet all the voting goes on somewhere else. — 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

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 the outside in relation to others in their world. — 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

We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact. — Walter Kirn

I preferred that my bad dreams be vague. — Walter Kirn

I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping. — 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

The atom was split by persistence. — Walter Kirn

Statistics on the dangers guns pose to the health of their owners and those who live with them suggest that I'd be safer selling my guns than reserving them for 'Tombstone II.' — Walter Kirn

I sensed the presence of wizened bachelor potters working in sheds behind their mothers' houses. — 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

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

My mother used to push 'Wuthering Heights' on me as a boy, and I sensed from her breathy description of the story that it would make me laugh. I have no plans to find out if this is true. — Walter Kirn

We're all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time - when we aren't flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation - this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable. — 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

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 new and clean and swift what otherwise might be ponderous, round and slow. — Walter Kirn

Something about the structure of my brain, its associative, porous, open-endedness, was defenseless against the ever-enlarging Web. Every video, news story, photo, email, stock chart, sexy picture, and five-day weather forecast was an enticement to step into the forest, and once I was two or three bread crumbs down the path, the witches had me, I was in their oven. — Walter Kirn

A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don't; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all. — Walter Kirn

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 as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling. — Walter Kirn

I've been around - having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that - some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they're just as nutty as the rest of us - sometimes worse. — Walter Kirn

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer ... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine. — Walter Kirn

I'd assumed that a deal was a deal when Princeton admitted me, but I was wrong. The price of getting in - to the university itself, and to the great world it promised to open up - was an endless dunning for nebulous services that weren't included in the initial quote. — Walter Kirn

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

The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I'll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth's curvature allows. It's a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it all in at one, why move? — Walter Kirn

His voice sounded more sincere in these surroundings, less distorted by pride and pain. — 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

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

Here's how adaptation works - almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jacks, and some of the jacks have been made into twos. — 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

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 that the voting public is, too. They count on outrage, thereby spreading numbness. They cherish the prospect of partisan fury, thereby inspiring nonpartisan disgust. — 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

To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your "Core Attachments," means apologizing for your very existence. — Walter Kirn

In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth. — Walter Kirn

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 not a lot of realistic, observant writing about the West right now. — Walter Kirn

People can be so neglectful of each other and of their own heritage - then death intrudes. Conversations we wish that we'd had earlier are had too late. — Walter Kirn

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too. — Walter Kirn

If writers, like comedians or singers, could only hear themselves bombing as they worked, it's likely that certain books would be cut short after the first few leaden sentences. — Walter Kirn

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, wants to use real life in his books. The other part is the Midwesterner, who, you know, wants to say nice things about people and be polite. — Walter Kirn

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

I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind. — Walter Kirn

In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.' — Walter Kirn

Everyone his own cinematographer. His own stream-of-consciousness e-mail poet. His own nightclub DJ. His own political columnist. His own biographer of his top-10 friends! — Walter Kirn

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

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

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

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

The future of time, of how it's won or lost, endured or enjoyed, expanded or compressed, will depend on how it's valued, not how it's measured. — 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

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

'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

Who were all these people, so many of them so brown? What was this ritual unfolding around him? I've never seen a German look as German as Clark did when he assessed his likely assessors. His eyes were like small blue coins behind his glasses. — Walter Kirn

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 York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do. — Walter Kirn

If I had to pick between knowing just a little about a lot of folks and knowing everything about a few, I'd opt for the long, wide-angle shot, I think. — Walter Kirn

I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone. — Walter Kirn

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness. — Walter Kirn

I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden. — 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

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 what politicians, seducers and currency speculators have, but persistence is a quality found in termites. It's the blind drive to keep on working that persists after confidence breaks down. — Walter Kirn

We want to believe that we're invulnerable, and that people who get tricked deserve it. Well, they don't. And someday the arrogant types who mock the gullible are likely to get their turn to wear the dunce cap. — Walter Kirn

Good short-story collections, like good record albums, are almost always hit-and-miss affairs - successful if they include three or four great tracks, wildly successful if they have five. And that's as it should be. — Walter Kirn

I've noticed that the few times I've traveled first class myself, you've already got your drink, and your coat has been taken by the time the rest of the passengers file on, and it's hard not to feel sorry for them. They're sort of trooping past you like cows to slaughter and you're sitting there in your, you know, wide-body seat. — Walter Kirn

He lived in two modes, the apparent and the veiled, and in two realms, the opera and the sewer, and he shuttled between them like a genie. — Walter Kirn

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, the big break. Sit down at a lunch counter, stand back up a star. Invest in a new issue and watch it soar. Split a single atom, win a war. — Walter Kirn

When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what? — Walter Kirn

Yes, in the commercial world there's room for both McDonald's and Whole Foods, but in the realm of politics, we're told, it's either Filet-o-Fish or line-caught salmon: only one can prevail - and which is up to you. — Walter Kirn

I grew up in a little town in Minnesota, 500 people. I went out to Princeton, and I wasn't very well-accepted out there by the fancy folks of Princeton University, I felt. I came away bruised and feeling rejected. — Walter Kirn