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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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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Someone
Requesting
Persons
Overbearing
Person
Accusing
Really
Demanding
Way
Permission
Couldn
Along
Honest

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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.
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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?
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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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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.
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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.
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I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
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To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
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The market is the only critic that matters.
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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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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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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.
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I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
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I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.
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The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
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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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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
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Love is a powerful painkiller.
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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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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.
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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