Quote

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

Walter Kirn

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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Virtue
Lines
Indefensible
Even
Negotiable
Make
Potent
Draw
Draws
Level
Levels

More quotes by 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.
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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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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
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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.
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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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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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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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Love is a powerful painkiller.
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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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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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In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.
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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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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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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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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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The market is the only critic that matters.
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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