172 Quotes by Walter Kirn

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.

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.

Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting.

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.

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.

I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn - small, tasty delights - and I like to gorge on them now and then.

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

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.

We want to believe that we're invulnerable, and that people who get tricked deserve it. Well, they don't. And someday the arrogant types who mock the gullible are likely to get their turn to wear the dunce cap.