Walter Kirn Quotes

A hundred and fifty years ago, this was just a continent. You could move to the borders and start a whole new country.

`What should be, is.` As my grandmother explained it to our family the winter she lost three fingertips to frostbite when the furnace in her little house broke and she fell and cracked a hip while trying to light it, `Accepting life`s imperfections is not the secret. The secret, dears, is to understand life has none. How could it? We`ve got nothing to compare it to. We can dream something up, of course- some pretty maybe life where fingers are very hard and indestructible- but that`s pure mischief, darlings. Fingers freeze. It`s one of the things they like to do sometimes.`

(Most writers` view of the New West is) either phony - obsessed with the same tired mythology - or it`s obsessed with anti-mythology, ... There`s not a lot of realistic, observant writing about the West right now.

because she was very upset and I was trying to do the gentlemanly thing.

She started out all excited and impressed. ... (She took an immediate dislike to Bill, who struck her as a narcissistic snake.)

Literally, while I was writing, the town eccentrics were looking over my shoulder, asking about what I was writing, listening to my explanations, offering their two cents. It had gotten around town pretty quickly that what Walter was doing inside his house could be viewed easily on a computer. I thought, `This is more interactivity than I can stand!` But it was interesting too.

I wasn`t above having thoughts of God`s wrath.

They don`t understand that in the West, there are many groups that have not yet made their peace with the rest of America. . . . People came to the West to be left alone, as the Mormons did. The West continues to be an experimental American culture.