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 Read Quote
I’ve come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize. Walter Kirn Read Quote
The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone. Walter Kirn Read Quote
On the Web, we can be whoever we wish to be, editing the face we show to others in ways that aren’t possible in physical space. We can also fine-tune the complexity and depth of our interactions and relationships. Walter Kirn Read Quote
There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world. Walter Kirn Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Statistics on the dangers guns pose to the health of their owners and those who live with them suggest that I’d be safer selling my guns than reserving them for ‘Tombstone II.’ Walter Kirn Read Quote
Guns can turn you into an insider even if you’re an outsider by nature, recruiting you into a loose fraternity of people who feel embattled and defensive and are primally eager to win allies. Walter Kirn Read Quote
A loving mother-son relationship is always a plot or outwitting of some kind. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but…’ my mother was always saying to me – when I wasn’t saying it to her. Walter Kirn Read Quote
