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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
Failed
Experiments
Department
Expected
Short
Conclusive
Fiction
Hoped
Less
Insightful
Stories

More quotes by 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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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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What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
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Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
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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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It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
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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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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.
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I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.
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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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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
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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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When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
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A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn
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The market is the only critic that matters.
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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Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
Walter Kirn
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I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn