Walter Kirn Quotes

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

When I wrote 'Your Republic Is Calling You,' it was Franz Kafka's writing that I had most in mind, and James Joyce's 'Ulysses.' Entirely out of the blue, Kafka's characters receive an order to go somewhere, and when they try to comply, they never quite manage it. Ki-yong in 'Your Republic Is Calling You' is precisely that sort of character.

In 'Mad Men,' we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.

My father and I never really achieved a real relationship. We probably saw each other 20 or 25 times in our lifetime.

You can't be angsty all day or else it becomes a sort of pale angst.

If I didn't like someone, I wouldn't want him calling me up when I was dying. I wouldn't want them having regrets that they didn't talk to me.

When he says he loves me, it only means he loves me at that particular instant. Like his promises, which he never keeps. Why does he torment me like this, when he could finish it off at once?

People from New York have been calling, to see if I'm still alive. When I answer the phone, you can hear the disappointment in their voice.

You just reach a point sometimes with somebody where it just doesn't work.

The beautiful heroine might be thinking, How long must I bury my face on this wretched man's shoulder? Such is not the always the case, but quite often it is.

There's no dancing girls. We're kinda like secondary to the thing. It's a story about these two guys that are in love with this one girl and how it unfolds and what happens.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'

I didn't feel particularly close to my father.

Now that I have found someone, I'm feeling more alone... than I ever have before.

Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowed room with boring people than I feel on my own.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

Most of us live in artificial environments and then we go to work in artificial environments and the world becomes something that you see through a window.

There was something special and unique about the love triangle that existed between Clark Kent, Superman and Lois Lane.

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.

The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.

You do not send me to Brooklyn to get a cheesecake and then I come back and you're gone.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.

I've always felt lonely, even if I'm in a great relationship or surrounded by my friends and family.

I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.