Walter Kirn Quotes: top 67 famous quotes about Walter Kirn

Walter Kirn Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Walter Kirn quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them? — Walter Kirn

God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast? — Walter Kirn

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

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

This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it. — Walter Kirn

She was already dead, but we were starved for followers and stupefied by the elixir of our own heroism, and so we pretended words could resurrect her. — Walter Kirn

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

The market is the only critic that matters. — 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

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

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

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story. — Walter Kirn

Love is a powerful painkiller. — Walter Kirn

Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted. — 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

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

Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely. — 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

How soon human beings forget what a privilege it is to live in freedom. A privilege, not an honor. An honor would mean we deserved it. We do not. — Walter Kirn

Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act. — 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

The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely. — Walter Kirn

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

For time to pass it would have to go somewhere, and where would that be? Time sits. We move, it sits. Sometimes it trembles slightly, but that's all. — Walter Kirn

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

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

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

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

It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving. — Walter Kirn

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

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

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

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

Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it. — Walter Kirn

Men who turn their faith into a business owe all of us a steak dinner now and then. — 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've come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize. — Walter Kirn

Frustration comes from fighting your own momentum. — Walter Kirn

I could see tall ideas standing up behind his eyes. — Walter Kirn

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

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

Though I no longer liked him or respected him, the thought of his disapproval frightened me. — Walter Kirn

[T]he anti-vitriol vitriol is getting ugly. — Walter Kirn

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

The atom was split by persistence. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them. — Walter Kirn

Meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far. — Walter Kirn

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

Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes. — Walter Kirn

Thoughts are thoughts and that's all they are. — Walter Kirn

Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I'm hoping so. — Walter Kirn

Liars are exhausting people. — Walter Kirn

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

The jurors appear vaguely stranded and at loose ends, uprooted from their routines and livelihoods. — Walter Kirn