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" Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting. "
Walter Kirn
Life
Uncertainty
Gambling
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
" The idea that Americans favor politicians who either remind them of themselves or can imagine what their selves are like because they too have struggled and sung the blues, is, like very best theories of human behavior, immune to falsification by mere evidence. "
Walter Kirn
Blues
Behavior
Best
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Generation
Own
Lens
" 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
" Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act. "
Walter Kirn
Panic
Violence
Act
" A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too. "
Walter Kirn
Say
Life
Tell
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that this was going on and I hadn't known about it before. I was flabbergasted. "
Walter Kirn
Thought
Time
Past
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Story
True
Push
" I've been around - having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that - some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they're just as nutty as the rest of us - sometimes worse. "
Walter Kirn
Sometimes
Rest
My Life
" Stopping to think is fine for characters, but not for their creators. They have to work. "
Walter Kirn
Stopping
Fine
Characters
" 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
" I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self. "
Walter Kirn
Politics
Technology
Self
" I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small, tasty delights, and I like to gorge on them now and then. "
Walter Kirn
Small
Candy
Facts
" My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine. "
Walter Kirn
Ambition
Writer
Mine
" A president, like a college freshman, can't know in advance which questions he'll have to answer or what topics he'll have to master. He has to be flexible, supple, and responsive. He has to be comfortable with multiple-choice. "
Walter Kirn
Comfortable
Questions
College
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Nothing
Environment
Cozy
" 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
" However old-fashioned and right-wing this may sound, the American genius for language lies in understatement, in saying things simply, pointedly and quickly, and in making new and clean and swift what otherwise might be ponderous, round and slow. "
Walter Kirn
Saying
Slow
American
" When I was writing about the Republican primaries, it was as though the Bible was a black box that people reached into to pull out edicts and prejudices and rules and opinions, and I wish they had fact-checked it! Especially Rick Santorum. "
Walter Kirn
Bible
Black
People
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Good
Gun
Morning
" 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. "
Walter Kirn
Life
People
Ideas
" 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
" The least sexy city is Los Angeles. And it poses as the most sexy. As you grow up, L.A. is being sold to you as home of the bikini-clad party girls. And then you get there, and it's full of very goal-oriented, yoga-obsessed careerists. "
Walter Kirn
City
Home
Party