Quotes by Walter Kirn

About Walter Kirn:

Walter Kirn is an American novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is the author of eight books, most notably Up in the Air, which was made into a movie starring George Clooney.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't beli...

Walter Kirn

Guns can turn you into an insider even if you're an outsider by nature, recruiting you into a loose fraternity of people who feel embattled and defensive and are primally eager to win allies.

Walter Kirn

I've come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize.

Walter Kirn

A loving mother-son relationship is always a plot or outwitting of some kind. 'Don't tell anyone, but...' my mother was always saying to me - when I wasn't saying it to her.

Walter Kirn

I think people get a sense of possibility when they're on a plane, even romantic possibility, wondering if the perfect person is going to sit down next to them or something.

Walter Kirn

The success that Americans are said to worship is success of a specific sort: accomplished not through hard work, primarily, but through the ingenious angle, the big break. Sit down at a lunch counter, stand back up a star. Invest in a new issue and ...

Walter Kirn

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

Walter Kirn

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.

Walter Kirn

You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book.

Walter Kirn

Yes, in the commercial world there's room for both McDonald's and Whole Foods, but in the realm of politics, we're told, it's either Filet-o-Fish or line-caught salmon: only one can prevail - and which is up to you.

Walter Kirn

I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.

Walter Kirn

It's been a concern of mine for years that the mainstream media coverage of culture and politics takes place in two nodes, Washington and New York, and yet all the voting goes on somewhere else.

Walter Kirn

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

Walter Kirn

I say 'here's the thing' a lot, both to alert people that I'm about to say something important and to give myself a moment to figure out what that important thing might be, because my head is so often completely empty.

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 embarrassment?

Walter Kirn

We want to believe that we're invulnerable, and that people who get tricked deserve it. Well, they don't. And someday the arrogant types who mock the gullible are likely to get their turn to wear the dunce cap.

Walter Kirn

My mother used to push 'Wuthering Heights' on me as a boy, and I sensed from her breathy description of the story that it would make me laugh. I have no plans to find out if this is true.

Walter Kirn

However old-fashioned and right-wing this may sound, the American genius for language lies in understatement, in saying things simply, pointedly and quickly, and in making new and clean and swift what otherwise might be ponderous, round and slow.

Walter Kirn

Novelists who pretend to understand what keeps them scribbling are really just guessing. A profound, unmet childish need to be acknowledged? Maybe. It hardly matters, though. The termite that asks itself why it keeps chewing risks becoming sluggish a...

Walter Kirn

The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and their own gullibility, and they tend to just quietly go away.

Walter Kirn

I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to h...

Walter Kirn

Author Bio

  • NameWalter Kirn
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist
  • BornAugust 3, 1962
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor