Walter Kirn Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“My mother used to push 'Wuthering Heights' on me as a boy, and I sensed from her breathy description of the story that it would make me laugh. I have no plans to find out if this is true.”

“One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading.”

“The Bible has been through millions of rounds of exegesis and interpretation, but it hasn't been until quite recently that it's been taken as the absolute truth, to the point where people expect it to inform ideas about biology and life on this planet.”

“The fictionally correct have all the answers, and that's what's wrong with them. They're artistic technocrats. There's no dilemma so knotty, no question so baffling, that it can't be smoothly neutralized by dialing up the right attitude adjustment. Poor old Hemingway. If only he'd known.”

“When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the reader longs to be somewhere, not just anywhere, and certainly not nowhere.”

“A sociopath doesn't warm up their environment, doesn't make it cozy. They don't have to; when they're not performing, when they're not manipulating, when they're all alone, there's nothing.”

“Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting.”

“God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast?”

“Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.”

“If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.”