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The market is the only critic that matters.

Walter Kirn

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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Market
Matter
Critic
Commerce
Critics
Matters

More quotes by Walter Kirn

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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.
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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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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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
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
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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
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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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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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Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
Walter Kirn
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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.
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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A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
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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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.
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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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
Walter Kirn
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Love is a powerful painkiller.
Walter Kirn
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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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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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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.
Walter Kirn