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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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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
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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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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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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.
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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 feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
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Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
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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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To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
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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.
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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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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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The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
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The market is the only critic that matters.
Walter Kirn
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Love is a powerful painkiller.
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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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
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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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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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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