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" A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble. "
Walter Kirn
Trouble
Asking
Writing
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" I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and she was gorgeous and sexy. I don't know whether it was just my taste, but when I got to London, I went two years without seeing a truly attractive woman. A lot of near misses. "
Walter Kirn
Great
Woman
Sexy
" Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to add to it unless you have a damn good reason. "
Walter Kirn
Become
Damn
Good
" Thanks to Twitter, iPads, BlackBerrys, voice-activated in-dash navigation systems, and a hundred other technologies that offer distraction anywhere, anytime, boredom has loosened its grip on us at last - that once-crushing 'weight' has become, for the most part, a memory. "
Walter Kirn
Become
Thanks
Memory
" You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book. "
Walter Kirn
Book
Politics
Movies
" According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad - so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed - that they're actually rather good. "
Walter Kirn
Good
Guilty
Movies
" At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness. "
Walter Kirn
Atmosphere
Poet
Language
" The future of time, of how it's won or lost, endured or enjoyed, expanded or compressed, will depend on how it's valued, not how it's measured. "
Walter Kirn
Will
Future
Depend
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Blindness
Go
Reason
" I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called. "
Walter Kirn
American
Think
Myself
" Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom. "
Walter Kirn
Time
Now
Month
" Nothing is less suspenseful than a threat that threatens the maker of the threat at least as much as the subject of the threat. Congress hasn't learned this yet, but America has learned it over and over. "
Walter Kirn
Congress
Nothing
Over
" 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 to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of. "
Walter Kirn
Nature
Birthday
Black
" In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.' "
Walter Kirn
Purpose
Time
Reading
" Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out. "
Walter Kirn
New
You
Will
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Los Angeles
Want
Page
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Free
Now
New
" Statistics on the dangers guns pose to the health of their owners and those who live with them suggest that I'd be safer selling my guns than reserving them for 'Tombstone II.' "
Walter Kirn
Live
Selling
Statistics
" Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides. "
Walter Kirn
Less
Past
Future
" Good short-story collections, like good record albums, are almost always hit-and-miss affairs - successful if they include three or four great tracks, wildly successful if they have five. And that's as it should be. "
Walter Kirn
Successful
Good
Always
" I've come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize. "
Walter Kirn
Power
More
Learn
" Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting. "
Walter Kirn
Life
Uncertainty
Gambling
" Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough. "
Walter Kirn
Left
Truth Is
Win
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
New York
New
Culture
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Phone
Conversation
Now
" Here's how adaptation works - almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jacks, and some of the jacks have been made into twos. "
Walter Kirn
Values
Here
Cards
" The success that Americans are said to worship is success of a specific sort: accomplished not through hard work, primarily, but through the ingenious angle, the big break. Sit down at a lunch counter, stand back up a star. Invest in a new issue and watch it soar. Split a single atom, win a war. "
Walter Kirn
Down
Hard Work
Success
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Long
Literature
Touch
" Realize that the game of life is the game of, to some extent, being taken advantage of by people who make a science of it. Whether they are in government or personal life or in business, they're everywhere. "
Walter Kirn
Life
Business
People
" Yes, in the commercial world there's room for both McDonald's and Whole Foods, but in the realm of politics, we're told, it's either Filet-o-Fish or line-caught salmon: only one can prevail - and which is up to you. "
Walter Kirn
McDonald
You
Yes
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Fiction
Stories
Just