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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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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Least
Enemy
Memo
Friends
Memos
Learn
Partisans
Hate
Extreme
Love
Extremes
Enemies
Bring

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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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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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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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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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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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In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.
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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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A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
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I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
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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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The market is the only critic that matters.
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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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Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
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It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
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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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