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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.

Walter Kirn

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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Stories
Insightful
Failed
Experiments
Department
Expected
Short
Fiction
Conclusive
Less
Hoped

More quotes by Walter Kirn

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Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
Walter Kirn
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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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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.
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The market is the only critic that matters.
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The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
Walter Kirn
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Love is a powerful painkiller.
Walter Kirn
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I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.
Walter Kirn
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Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.
Walter Kirn
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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?
Walter Kirn
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Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn
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Some strangers become more important to you than family, maybe because you're not expected to love them. You can leave them whenever you want to. They can, too. Every moment together is a choice.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn
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He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.
Walter Kirn
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Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
Walter Kirn
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Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn
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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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Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.
Walter Kirn
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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
Walter Kirn