Quotes from Walter Kirn

Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act.

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.

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.

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 owners seem so touchy; they feel, at some level, like criminals in waiting.

Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy.

When I shoot at the range, I don't feel personally powerful but like the custodian of something powerful. I feel like a successful disciplinarian of something radically alien and potent. Analyze this sensation all you want; you still can't make it go away.

Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.

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

Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.

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.

I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.

He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.

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.

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

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

Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.

Love is a powerful painkiller.

Liars are exhausting people.

To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your "Core Attachments," means apologizing for your very existence.

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 inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.

The atom was split by persistence.

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby

It's the little deceptions that no one catches that are going to dissolve it all someday. We'll look at clocks and we won't believe the hands. They'll forecast sun but we'll pack our slickers anyway.