Walter Kirn Quotes

Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be blank and be filled in.

Philippe,

About Author

Walter Norris Kirn (born August 3, 1962) 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 film of the same name starring George Clooney.

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...

I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: 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...

To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your Core Attachments, means apologizing for your very existence.

I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone.

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

I sensed the presence of wizened bachelor potters working in sheds behind their mothers’ houses.

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 perso...

The atom was split by persistence.

Truth from him, is a swan dive through a mirror into a whirlpool.

I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.

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.

His voice sounded more sincere in these surroundings, less distorted by pride and pain.

They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required.

He looked like a being who'd voyaged back through time from a world that had overcome illness, pain, and conflict.

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

Central Wyoming was like hell without the flames, an underworld thrust up onto the surface.

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 conto...

The fictionally correct have all the answers, and that's what's wrong with them. They're artistic technocrats. There's no dilemma so knotty, no question so baffling, that it can't be smoothly neutrali...