Top 40 Walter Kirn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it’s someone else’s witch being hunted.”

— Walter Kirn

2. “Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.”

— Walter Kirn

3. “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

4. “Love is a powerful painkiller.”

— Walter Kirn

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

— Walter Kirn

6. “I still believe in love. I always will. It’s my blessing and my burden.”

— Walter Kirn

7. “I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.”

— Walter Kirn

8. “You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you’re lost now.”

— Walter Kirn

9. “To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.”

— Walter Kirn

10. “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

11. “The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.”

— Walter Kirn

12. “The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.”

— Walter Kirn

13. “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

14. “I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.”

— Walter Kirn

15. “I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn – small, tasty delights – and I like to gorge on them now and then.”

— Walter Kirn

16. “Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth’s total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism.”

— Walter Kirn

17. “The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely.”

— Walter Kirn

18. “The market is the only critic that matters.”

— Walter Kirn

19. “Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn.”

— Walter Kirn

20. “Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be blank and be filled in.”

— Walter Kirn

21. “Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn’t be honest all along.”

— Walter Kirn

22. “In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth...”

— Walter Kirn

23. “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

24. “He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can’t make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.”

— Walter Kirn

25. “Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.”

— Walter Kirn

26. “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

27. “What is it in people, or just in people like me, that would rather let a lie go by, would rather wish it away or minimize it, than point it out and cause the liar embarassment?”

— Walter Kirn

28. “Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.”

— Walter Kirn

29. “When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, ‘Gnome Chomsky,’ Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?”

— Walter Kirn

30. “The atom was split by persistence.”

— Walter Kirn

31. “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

32. “I’ve been told my old city possesses a ‘thriving arts scene,’ whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.”

— Walter Kirn

33. “What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone’s cold chicken bones or being offered them?”

— Walter Kirn

34. “I could see tall ideas standing up behind his eyes.”

— Walter Kirn

35. “Other people’s devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people’s kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.”

— Walter Kirn

36. “It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.”

— Walter Kirn

37. “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

38. “Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I’m hoping so.”

— Walter Kirn

39. “The best critic needn’t be right, just interesting.”

— Walter Kirn

40. “It’s the little deceptions that no one catches that are going to dissolve it all someday. We’ll look at clocks and we won’t believe the hands. They’ll forecast sun but we’ll pack our slickers anyway.”

— Walter Kirn

41. “A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.”

— Walter Kirn