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" In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth. "
Walter Kirn
Everything
Earth
Age
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" 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
" I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption. "
Walter Kirn
View
Healing
Self
" 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
" The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone. "
Walter Kirn
Social Media
Alone
Choice
" 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
" We're on Twitter with one side of our personality, and Facebook with another, and LinkedIn with another side of our personality, and we're toggling between them. That's just a version of what an impostor does: shifting from one side of their personality to another with lightning speed. "
Walter Kirn
Speed
Facebook
Personality
" 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
" I like to think that I could praise the good book of someone I personally dislike. I try not to comment on the person, to be insulting, but I have no trouble being insulting to the work. "
Walter Kirn
Book
Good
Praise
" 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 contortionist, able to rise to almost every challenge placed before him, except the challenge of real self-knowledge. "
Walter Kirn
Challenge
Weird
People
" Everyone his own cinematographer. His own stream-of-consciousness e-mail poet. His own nightclub DJ. His own political columnist. His own biographer of his top-10 friends! "
Walter Kirn
DJ
Own
Friends
" At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness. "
Walter Kirn
Atmosphere
Poet
Language
" My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine. "
Walter Kirn
Ambition
Writer
Mine
" There are two sides to me. One is the writer. That's a savage person who looks at everything as a story and, you know, wants to use real life in his books. The other part is the Midwesterner, who, you know, wants to say nice things about people and be polite. "
Walter Kirn
Know
Story
Nice
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Question
Attitude
Poor
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Doubt
Students
Early
" 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
" There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world. "
Walter Kirn
World
Others
Movies
" The room-service Caesar salads with soggy croutons, the distant relatives who show up at readings pitching weird, far-fetched investment schemes, the fans who have you sign a book to 'Cathy' and then tell you, 'No, it's Kathy with a K' - it gets challenging after a while. It tests your stamina. "
Walter Kirn
Weird
You
Investment
" 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 tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand. "
Walter Kirn
Die
Soul
Legal
" You're able to do things in novels: introduce subplots, other characters, thematic layers and so on, in a way that you simply can't in a movie. A movie really has to choose its battles. "
Walter Kirn
You
Way
Other
" 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
" A loving mother-son relationship is always a plot or outwitting of some kind. 'Don't tell anyone, but...' my mother was always saying to me - when I wasn't saying it to her. "
Walter Kirn
Mother
Relationship
Saying
" If writers, like comedians or singers, could only hear themselves bombing as they worked, it's likely that certain books would be cut short after the first few leaden sentences. "
Walter Kirn
Books
First
Short
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Political
Blame
Business