Quotessence
Home / Authors / Walter Kirn
Walter Kirn

Walter Kirn Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllIfsPersonsUseWritingBookDreamHumansKnowsLevelsMaterials

Famous Walter Kirn Quotes

“Bailey, a former prosecutor, attacked her credibility scattershot, an approach he would use throughout the trial, particularly with female witnesses. ... He accused her, that is--without coming out and saying it--of being a certain kind of woman: conceited, disingenuous, and dissatisfied. The universal misogynist caricature. I'd never gone in for academic gender theories, but Bailey's cross-examination strategy--with Farrar and other women to come--convinced me that the culture of criminal justice has a fundamentally masculine tilt. Repeatedly, in a manner that I suspected was typical in modern courtrooms, he portrayed the female mind as intrinsically unreliable, ruled by emotion, immune to logic, prone to pettiness, swayed by lust, and corrupted by vanity. It rarely spoke plainly. It was seldom candid. It was composed of layers of hidden agendas. It put up a front, behind which was another front. It either aimed to please or to conceal, which were often the same thing. The only way to get the truth from it was to push and prod until it snapped. Make it angry. Make it cry.”

GenderMisogynistCross Examination
Book:Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
Create image

“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.”

IfsThinkingUseTurnsOne ThingMaterialsReaderSomedayWiser
Book:Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
Create image

“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.”

YearsPersonsBookDifferentStoriesIndividualBloodPerspectiveHusbandFocusedMemoirVersionsDisagreeConventionalFooledConcentratingSelectiveDifferent Perspective
Author:Walter Kirn
Create image

“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.”

KnowsMeanLyingDifferencesSituationRolesDramaticInternalsFlatsModestManageableDramatic Situations
Author:Walter Kirn
Create image

“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.”

WellsMomentsHelpingBigsRunningCertainLiteratureLevelsRiskDestructionAdmireCompellingThreateningHumiliationFlirtingEmbarrassment
Author:Walter Kirn
Create image

“'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.”

PersonsEndsSelfStoriesMightJourneyTerribleCostDisasterInventionDefinedRadicalNarrativeWho We AreThrillTradingTemptedEmulateAlluring
Author:Walter Kirn
Create image

“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.”

PeopleIfsWritingHumansBookDoneDreamInterestTalkingShareAdviceNew YorkProjectsStandardsYour DreamsProposeWriting A BookAspiring Writers
Author:Walter Kirn
Create image

“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.”

NeedsFoundSoundQualityBreakNovelPoliticianBlindPersistenceTraitsCurrencyPersistBreaking DownSpeculators
Author:Walter Kirn
Create image