Walter Kirn Quotes

Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.

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

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

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

I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn - small, tasty delights - and I like to gorge on them now and then.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?

It's no accident that most self-help groups use 'anonymous' in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The best anti-depressant pill for me would be one the size of a house so you could drop it on me and put me out of my misery.

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

Love is a powerful painkiller.

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

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

The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.