Quotes by Walter Kirn

“When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?”

“Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?”

“My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you cant 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 w...”

“@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.”

“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 a...”

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and insp...”

“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.”

“Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.”

“Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.”

“Bailey, a former prosecutor, attacked her credibility scattershot, an approach he would use throughout the trial, particularly with female witnesses. ...He accused her, that is--without coming out ...”

“This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.”

“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...”

“Cross the wrong state border with your gun, or wake up one morning to new legislation or a new presidential executive order, and suddenly you're the bad guy, not the good guy. No wonder some gun ow...”

“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 co...”

“I think people get a sense of possibility when they're on a plane, even romantic possibility, wondering if the perfect person is going to sit down next to them or something.”

“The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.”

“In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural ...”

“Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.”

“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 pe...”

“Liars are exhausting people.”