Walter Kirn
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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
real hate alternatives
Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.
use turns materials
A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
moving touching age
In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth..
cold bones chickens
What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
writing years games
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.
quiet cunning
Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
media choices lessons
The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialise alone.
kissing people devotion
Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.
journey self cost
'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.
dream dumb
It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
art lying thinking
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.
faults language obsession
Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
lying mean dramatic-situations
We're all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time - when we aren't flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation - this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable.
interesting critics
The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.