Walter Kirn
Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?Collection: Hate
The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.Collection: Interesting
Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.Collection: Reflection
Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.Collection: Hate
Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.Collection: Art
Love is a powerful painkiller.Collection: Powerful
You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.Collection: May
The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.Collection: Beautiful
Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.Collection: Faults
The market is the only critic that matters.Collection: Matter
A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don't; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all.Collection: Use
There are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature run this risk constantly, flirting with destruction, not just humiliation or embarrassment. It's a spectacle that we can't help but find compelling, and it involves a certain level of courage that we sneakily admire, perhaps.Collection: Running
Quiet cunning bested boastful brawnCollection: Quiet
I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.Collection: Mind
Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.Collection: Kissing
I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.Collection: Dream
When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?Collection: Real
The best anti-depressant pill for me would be one the size of a house so you could drop it on me and put me out of my misery.Collection: House
Most writers' view of the New West is either phony - obsessed with the same tired mythology - or it's obsessed with anti-mythology, ... There's not a lot of realistic, observant writing about the West right now.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Dream
The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.Collection: Levels
To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.Collection: Mean
What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?Collection: Cold
I've 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.Collection: Art
It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.Collection: Dream
've always defined a truly alluring story as a journey we're not equipped to take ourselves with a person we're tempted but afraid to emulate. Impostor narratives are exactly that. When they end in disaster, as Clark's did, or as Gatsby's did, we can congratulate ourselves for our own wisdom. We can also experience, safely, at no cost, the terrible thrill of radical self-invention, of trading who we are for who we might be.Collection: Journey
realized that at a level I'd never been conscious we'd been engaged in a game of wits for years. I suppose most writer-subject pairings are like that. Of course, I'd set aside my plan to write about him [Clark Rockfeller] as soon as I'd gotten to know him some, but now I'd resumed that intention.Collection: Writing
I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping.Collection: Husband