Walter Kirn Quotes
Top 67 wise famous quotes and sayings by Walter Kirn
Walter Kirn Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Walter Kirn on Wise Famous Quotes.
What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast?
Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
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.
This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.
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.
I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.
If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
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.
Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.
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.
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.
Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act.
The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.
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.
At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.
To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your "Core Attachments," means apologizing for your very existence.
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.
When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
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.
Our habit of wishing backward from what is to what might have been is the soft but persistent tapping that cracks the crystal.
I've come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize.
Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting.
Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
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.
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.
Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?
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.
You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.
In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.