172 Quotes by Walter Kirn

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.

I read somewhere once that in the 1960s, fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more sensational than made-up stories could ever hope to be. Our new problem - more profound, I think - is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact.

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.

Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it.

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.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

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

I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.