I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story. Walter Kirn More Quotes by Walter Kirn More Quotes From Walter Kirn Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying. Walter Kirn kindtryingart I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden. Walter Kirn burdenblessingbelieve Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes. Walter Kirn luxurybreathingrelaxation I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping. Walter Kirn husbandbookblood At the beginning of a novel, a writer needs confidence, but after that what's required is persistence. These traits sound similar. They aren't. Confidence is what politicians, seducers and currency speculators have, but persistence is a quality found in termites. It's the blind drive to keep on working that persists after confidence breaks down. Walter Kirn persistencequalitysound Some strangers become more important to you than family, maybe because you're not expected to love them. You can leave them whenever you want to. They can, too. Every moment together is a choice. Walter Kirn importantchoicestogether It's no accident that most self-help groups use 'anonymous' in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one. Walter Kirn wiping-outselfnames A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don't; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all. Walter Kirn consciousnessliteratureuse 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. Walter Kirn heartbeatsometimesworld Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it. Walter Kirn alternativeshatereal There are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature run this risk constantly, flirting with destruction, not just humiliation or embarrassment. It's a spectacle that we can't help but find compelling, and it involves a certain level of courage that we sneakily admire, perhaps. Walter Kirn flirtingriskrunning 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. Walter Kirn dramatic-situationsmeanlying Love is a powerful painkiller. Walter Kirn painkillerspowerfullove-is A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too. Walter Kirn somedayusethinking It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving. Walter Kirn dumbdream 've always defined a truly alluring story as a journey we're not equipped to take ourselves with a person we're tempted but afraid to emulate. Impostor narratives are exactly that. When they end in disaster, as Clark's did, or as Gatsby's did, we can congratulate ourselves for our own wisdom. We can also experience, safely, at no cost, the terrible thrill of radical self-invention, of trading who we are for who we might be. Walter Kirn narrativejourneyself You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now. Walter Kirn somedayrealizingmay I preferred that my bad dreams be vague. Walter Kirn bad-dreamvaguedream Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too. Walter Kirn faultsobsessionlanguage realized that at a level I'd never been conscious we'd been engaged in a game of wits for years. I suppose most writer-subject pairings are like that. Of course, I'd set aside my plan to write about him [Clark Rockfeller] as soon as I'd gotten to know him some, but now I'd resumed that intention. Walter Kirn gameswritingyears
