Walter Kirn > Quotes

“Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.”
― Walter Kirn, Mission to America

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

“Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.”
― Walter Kirn, Up in the Air

“I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.”
― Walter Kirn, Mission to America

“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

“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, Up in the Air

“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, Up in the Air

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

“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, She Needed Me

“Liars are exhausting people.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.”
― Walter Kirn, Up in the Air

“Love is a powerful painkiller.”
― Walter Kirn, Mission to America

“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, Up in the Air

“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, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever

“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, Up in the Air

“The atom was split by persistence.”
― Walter Kirn, Up in the Air

“You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby”
― Walter Kirn, Up in the Air

“Frustration comes from fighting your own momentum.”
― Walter Kirn, Mission to America

“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

“Bailey, a former prosecutor, attacked her credibility scattershot, an approach he would use throughout the trial, particularly with female witnesses. ...

He accused her, that is--without coming out and saying it--of being a certain kind of woman: conceited, disingenuous, and dissatisfied. The universal misogynist caricature.

I'd never gone in for academic gender theories, but Bailey's cross-examination strategy--with Farrar and other women to come--convinced me that the culture of criminal justice has a fundamentally masculine tilt. Repeatedly, in a manner that I suspected was typical in modern courtrooms, he portrayed the female mind as intrinsically unreliable, ruled by emotion, immune to logic, prone to pettiness, swayed by lust, and corrupted by vanity. It rarely spoke plainly. It was seldom candid. It was composed of layers of hidden agendas. It put up a front, behind which was another front. It either aimed to please or to conceal, which were often the same thing. The only way to get the truth from it was to push and prod until it snapped. Make it angry. Make it cry.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“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, Up in the Air

“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, Up in the Air

“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, She Needed Me

“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

“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, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“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, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.”
― Walter Kirn, Mission to America

“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, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“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