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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
Department
Expected
Short
Fiction
Conclusive
Less
Hoped
Stories
Insightful
Failed
Experiments

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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 love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn - small, tasty delights - and I like to gorge on them now and then.
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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.
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Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
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Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.
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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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The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialise alone.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
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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 looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
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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 most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
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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.
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To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
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Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
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