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

Here's how adaptation works - almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jack...

Walter Kirn

When I shoot at the range, I don't feel personally powerful but like the custodian of something powerful. I feel like a successful disciplinarian of something radically alien and potent. Analyze this sensation all you want; you still can't make it go...

Walter Kirn

Everyone his own cinematographer. His own stream-of-consciousness e-mail poet. His own nightclub DJ. His own political columnist. His own biographer of his top-10 friends!

Walter Kirn

The room-service Caesar salads with soggy croutons, the distant relatives who show up at readings pitching weird, far-fetched investment schemes, the fans who have you sign a book to 'Cathy' and then tell you, 'No, it's Kathy with a K' - it gets chal...

Walter Kirn

When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the re...

Walter Kirn

We're on Twitter with one side of our personality, and Facebook with another, and LinkedIn with another side of our personality, and we're toggling between them. That's just a version of what an impostor does: shifting from one side of their personal...

Walter Kirn

Thanks to Twitter, iPads, BlackBerrys, voice-activated in-dash navigation systems, and a hundred other technologies that offer distraction anywhere, anytime, boredom has loosened its grip on us at last - that once-crushing 'weight' has become, for th...

Walter Kirn

A president, like a college freshman, can't know in advance which questions he'll have to answer or what topics he'll have to master. He has to be flexible, supple, and responsive. He has to be comfortable with multiple-choice.

Walter Kirn

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

Walter Kirn

Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out.

Walter Kirn

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 foun...

Walter Kirn

Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.

Walter Kirn

E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.

Walter Kirn

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.

Walter Kirn

Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it.

Walter Kirn

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

Walter Kirn

I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.

Walter Kirn

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.

Walter Kirn

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

Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act.

Walter Kirn

I grew up in a little town in Minnesota, 500 people. I went out to Princeton, and I wasn't very well-accepted out there by the fancy folks of Princeton University, I felt. I came away bruised and feeling rejected.

Walter Kirn

Author Bio

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