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
artists ashamed blindness con quietly reason tend victims
The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and their own gullibility, and they tend to just quietly go away.
conversation
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.
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Since the founding of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other mainstays of what technology writers have come to call 'the social Web' or 'Web 2.0,' a sizable portion of humanity has learned to be together while apart, sacrificing intimacy for control and spontaneity for predictability.
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It's been a concern of mine for years that the mainstream media coverage of culture and politics takes place in two nodes, Washington and New York, and yet all the voting goes on somewhere else.
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I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.
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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.
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The reason that last-ditch political maneuvering has become business as usual in Washington is that the actors involved are drunk on blame and are convinced that the voting public is, too. They count on outrage, thereby spreading numbness. They cherish the prospect of partisan fury, thereby inspiring nonpartisan disgust.
came continues groups left mormons peace people rest understand west
They don't understand that in the West, there are many groups that have not yet made their peace with the rest of America. . . . People came to the West to be left alone, as the Mormons did. The West continues to be an experimental American culture.
above thoughts
I wasn't above having thoughts of God's wrath.
asking easily eccentrics gotten house inside listening looking offering quickly town viewed
Literally, while I was writing, the town eccentrics were looking over my shoulder, asking about what I was writing, listening to my explanations, offering their two cents. It had gotten around town pretty quickly that what Walter was doing inside his house could be viewed easily on a computer. I thought, 'This is more interactivity than I can stand!' But it was interesting too.
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She started out all excited and impressed. ... (She took an immediate dislike to Bill, who struck her as a narcissistic snake.)
failed hoped stories
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.
trying upset
because she was very upset and I was trying to do the gentlemanly thing.
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What should be, is.' As my grandmother explained it to our family the winter she lost three fingertips to frostbite when the furnace in her little house broke and she fell and cracked a hip while trying to light it, 'Accepting life's imperfections is not the secret. The secret, dears, is to understand life has none. How could it? We've got nothing to compare it to. We can dream something up, of course- some pretty maybe life where fingers are very hard and indestructible- but that's pure mischief, darlings. Fingers freeze. It's one of the things they like to do sometimes.