To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence. Walter Kirn More Quotes by Walter Kirn More Quotes From Walter Kirn 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. Walter Kirn hard-work work success war A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble. Walter Kirn who trouble asking writing Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it. Walter Kirn ask find who college I've been around - having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that - some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they're just as nutty as the rest of us - sometimes worse. Walter Kirn my-life rest sometimes life I grew up in a little town in Minnesota, 500 people. I went out to Princeton, and I wasn't very well-accepted out there by the fancy folks of Princeton University, I felt. I came away bruised and feeling rejected. Walter Kirn feeling university fancy people There are two sides to me. One is the writer. That's a savage person who looks at everything as a story and, you know, wants to use real life in his books. The other part is the Midwesterner, who, you know, wants to say nice things about people and be polite. Walter Kirn me you life people At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness. Walter Kirn atmosphere poet language college I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood. Walter Kirn english high doubt work
