Walter Kirn Quotes

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

What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?

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.

She's everything I wanted when I was young and everything I distrust now that I'm not.

Meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far.

Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.

Liars are exhausting people.

Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn

Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.

It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.

You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby

If you’ve helped someone die, there is nothing I can tell you. If you haven’t, I don’t want to tell you. But I must, or what came later may make no sense.

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.

I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining...

Epistemological

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

His thoughts were clearly still shoving him further away, toward some ultimate dark drama that he might or might not have actually lived through but whose telling would let out the pressure inside his...

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?

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.

The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.

The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I'll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth's curvature allows. It's a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it all in at o...