172 Quotes by Walter Kirn

It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.

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.

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth..

We're all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time - when we aren't flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation - this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable.

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.

The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.

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.

The market is the only critic that matters.