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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
Short
Fiction
Conclusive
Less
Hoped
Stories
Insightful
Failed
Experiments
Department
Expected

More quotes by Walter Kirn

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Love is a powerful painkiller.
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The market is the only critic that matters.
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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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A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
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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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I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
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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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Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
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Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.
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Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
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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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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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Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
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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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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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It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
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I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
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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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When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
Walter Kirn