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 Read Quote
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. Walter Kirn Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling. Walter Kirn Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Remember daydreams? No, of course you don’t. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out. Walter Kirn Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Uncertainty doesn’t make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting. Walter Kirn Read Quote
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 Read Quote
