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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
Critic
Critics
Interesting
Best
Right

More quotes by 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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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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Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
Walter Kirn
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Love is a powerful painkiller.
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 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
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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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Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
Walter Kirn
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Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
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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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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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 feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
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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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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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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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
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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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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A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
Walter Kirn