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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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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
First
Groups
Ritual
Steps
Accident
Names
Construction
Help
Followed
Use
Accidents
Helping
Step
Wiping
Firsts
Toward
Anonymous
Self
Americans
Redemption

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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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I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
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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.
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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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The market is the only critic that matters.
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What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
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I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
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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.
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Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
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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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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
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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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It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
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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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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.
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Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
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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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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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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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