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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

More quotes by Walter Kirn

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I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
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Love is a powerful painkiller.
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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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To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
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Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
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The market is the only critic that matters.
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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.
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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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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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It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
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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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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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Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.
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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Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
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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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.
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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In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.
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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