Walter Kirn famous quotes

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

#Believe #Blessing #Burden

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

#Breathing #Luxury #Relaxation

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

#Art #Trying #Kind

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

#Persistence #Quality #Needs

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

#Cold #Bones #Chickens

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

#Dream #Dumb

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

#Thinking #Use #Someday

You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.
-- Walter Kirn

#May #Realizing #Someday

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

#Dream #Bad Dream

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

#Way #Honest #Accusing

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

#Kissing #People #Devotion

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

#Media #Choices #Lessons

Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
-- Walter Kirn

#Quiet #Cunning

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

#Art #Lying #Thinking

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

#Real #Hate #Alternatives

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

#Choices #Together #Important

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

#Hate #Love You #Enemy

Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.
-- Walter Kirn

#World #Sometimes #Heartbeat

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

#Beautiful #Faces #Ugly

Love is a powerful painkiller.
-- Walter Kirn

#Powerful #Love Is #Painkillers

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

#Lines #Who We Are #Levels

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

#Insightful #Stories #Fiction

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

#Interesting #Acting #Retarded

Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
-- Walter Kirn

#Long #Witch #Hunts

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

#Real #Drs #Influence

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

#Dream #New York #Book

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

#Mean #Attachment #Apologizing

Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.
-- Walter Kirn

#Reflection #Soul #Fans

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

#Moving #Touching #Age

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

#Faults #Language #Obsession

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

#Interesting #Critics

The market is the only critic that matters.
-- Walter Kirn

#Matter #Critics #Commerce

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

#Tired #Writing #Views

A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
-- Walter Kirn

#Use #Turns #Materials