Quotes by Walter Kirn

“What should be, is. As my grandmother explained it to our family the winter she lost three fingertips to frostbite when the furnace in her little house broke and she fell and cracked a hip while trying to light it, Accepting lifes imperfections is not the secret. The secret, dears, is to understand life has none. How could it? Weve got nothing to compare it to. We can dream something up, of course- some pretty maybe life where fingers are very hard and indestructible- but thats pure mischief, darlings. Fingers freeze. Its one of the things they like to do sometimes.”

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.

@bobbybaird im a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.

The mist just keeps on lifting and soon Ill be able to see all the way, as far as the earths curvature allows. Its a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it all in at one, why move?

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

Memo to extreme partisans: If you cant bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?

Ive 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.

Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, Id started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didnt 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.

Given Loughners obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

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

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.Id never gone in for academic gender theories, but Baileys 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.

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

Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as its someone elses witch being hunted.

We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.

Liars are exhausting people.

The fictionally correct have all the answers, and thats whats wrong with them. Theyre artistic technocrats. Theres no dilemma so knotty, no question so baffling, that it cant be smoothly neutralized by dialing up the right attitude adjustment. Poor old Hemingway. If only hed known.

I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: go to New York. And if you cant 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.

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing Happy Birthday to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how theyll behave when we trap them in situations that they cant IM their way out of.

Cross the wrong state border with your gun, or wake up one morning to new legislation or a new presidential executive order, and suddenly youre the bad guy, not the good guy. No wonder some gun owners seem so touchy; they feel, at some level, like criminals in waiting.

To young people born under the weird planet of the SAT, intelligence was equated with agility, with raw acuity. It produced a certain sort of person of which I was a typical specimen: the mental contortionist, able to rise to almost every challenge placed before him, except the challenge of real self-knowledge.