{"author":"Walter Kirn","author_id":"Walter+Kirn","total_quotes":22,"quotes":[{"text":"Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["2011","2011-tuscon-shooting","enemies","friends","partisanship","politics","twitter"],"id":4435,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"},{"text":"In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["america","soul","american "],"id":30267,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"},{"text":"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.","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["literature"],"id":48525,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"},{"text":"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?","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["inspiration"],"id":57587,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"},{"text":"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.","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["art","artists"],"id":88259,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"},{"text":"Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault \u0026 Derrida deserve some fault here, too.","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["2011","2011-tuscon-shooting","blame-game","jacques-derrida","jared-lee-loughner","language","michel-foucault","twitter"],"id":118145,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"},{"text":"I think people get a sense of possibility when they're on a plane, even romantic possibility, wondering if the perfect person is going to sit down next to them or something.","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["people","perfect","think "],"id":131877,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"},{"text":"The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["social media","choice","media "],"id":136440,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"},{"text":"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.","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["answers","question","poor "],"id":156865,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"},{"text":"I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: 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.","author":"Walter Kirn","tags":["writing","your dreams","advice "],"id":160088,"author_id":"Walter+Kirn"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":22,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}