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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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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Materials
Writer
Turns
Use
Life
Uses
Material

More quotes by Walter Kirn

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The market is the only critic that matters.
Walter Kirn
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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
Walter Kirn
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I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.
Walter Kirn
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What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
Walter Kirn
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In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn
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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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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
Walter Kirn
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The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
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.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn
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Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
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
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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.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn
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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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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.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn
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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.
Walter Kirn