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The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.

Walter Kirn

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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Critics
Interesting
Best
Right
Critic

More quotes by 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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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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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
Walter Kirn
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It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
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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The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialise alone.
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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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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A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
Walter Kirn
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Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
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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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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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 still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.
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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The best anti-depressant pill for me would be one the size of a house so you could drop it on me and put me out of my misery.
Walter Kirn
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To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
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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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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I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
Walter Kirn