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

Walter Kirn

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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Core
Pinter
Personal
Attachments
Existence
Sandy
Means
Apologize
Mean
Apologizing
Attachment
Calls
Absolutes

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realized that at a level I'd never been conscious we'd been engaged in a game of wits for years. I suppose most writer-subject pairings are like that. Of course, I'd set aside my plan to write about him [Clark Rockfeller] as soon as I'd gotten to know him some, but now I'd resumed that intention.
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Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
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In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.
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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.
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A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
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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.
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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.
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What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
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You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.
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Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.
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The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
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I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
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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.
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Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?
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The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.
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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
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Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
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I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
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Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
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