Liars are exhausting people.

— Walter Kirn

Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.

— Walter Kirn

Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?

— Walter Kirn

My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.

— Walter Kirn

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

The fictionally correct have all the answers, and that's what's wrong with them. They're artistic technocrats. There's no dilemma so knotty, no question so baffling, that it can't be smoothly neutralized by dialing up the right attitude adjustment. Poor old Hemingway. If only he'd known.

— Walter Kirn

The mist just keeps on lifting, and soon I'll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth's curvature allows. It's a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it all in at one, why move?

— Walter Kirn

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.

— Walter Kirn

This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.

— Walter Kirn

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.

— Walter Kirn