Walter Kirn Quotes
I say 'here's the thing' a lot, both to alert people that I'm about to say something important and to give myself a moment to figure out what that important thing might be, because my head is so often completely empty.
Quotes to Explore
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I suppose Spotify is a good thing. The ads are quite annoying, but a lot of people seem to like it and use it. I don't myself, but it seems like a good idea, and the labels are getting a huge amount of money off it, but the artists aren't, so that must be good for them... but not us.
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Every time - well, not every time, but in celebration of a great review or a great accolade, I take the team of Daniel to Katz's Deli for lunch. We take the trip on the subway, we were like 40 or 50 people, and we go in the back room and have a pastrami sandwich.
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I love what I do. And why not be nice? I mean, I've seen people who work and they're apparently not enjoying it, and they're making sure everybody knows it.
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I pride myself on not being run of the mill. I don't want to be your umpteenth Fantine in 'Les Miz.'
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My biggest nightmare is I'm driving home and get sick and go to hospital. I say: 'Please help me.' And the people say: 'Hey, you look like...' And I'm dying while they're wondering whether I'm Barbra Streisand.
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Carefully calculate the potential size of your market to make sure you can grow. Before starting Mint, I knew that there were about 20 million people who had purchased 'Quicken' or 'Microsoft Money' over the years, and 80 million people using online banking in the U.S. alone.
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I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.
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I want to be back on Broadway one day. That's a dream of mine. There's nothing like live theater, and I think it's so important for me to be able to be on stage with an audience that responds.
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I barely need to reiterate what you already know: the close links that exist between our people and the people of Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, the promoter of the Bolivarian Revolution and the United Socialist Party he founded.
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People have said to me, 'It must be nice to prove so many people wrong,' but I've never really cared about proving anything to anybody else.
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
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I'm not one of those people who wake up chatting. I usually don't want to speak for the first 10 or 20 minutes. And I don't really want you to talk to me either!
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I motivate what I see in young people because we employ about forty thousand young people in our various Chick-fil-A units. Some of them come to work because they need to work; others just work because they just like to work. There's nothing wrong with that.
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Over the course of history, the people who are not scared go into the woods and are mauled by a bear, are not going to survive.
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I am very much aware that if I am getting good press at the moment I could just as easily be getting bad press. I cannot have the good and forget the bad. You have to accept it both ways.
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The reality is the world is a really, really big place, and there's a lot of people running around with a lot on their mind. And you really have to figure out how to build a company that can put on a message that can actually reach people and have an impact globally.
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Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.
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When the courts decide that murderers, rapists, and others who maliciously break our social contract deserve health care that most working Americans can't afford, they are condemning good people to death.
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The thing people have to remember is there's nothing natural about racism as it exists in America. I mean, we know this historically. We can look at 1619, when Africans first came here, and how early African slaves intermixed pretty indiscriminately with indentured white servants.
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As long as your storytelling and emotional depth are intact, that's what people will focus on.
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I wish I had had my books when I was a kid, I do.
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My father was an innovator. He's the first person who sang and set Rumi's poetry into music 35 years, 40 years ago.
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Sometimes we can't see our own selves, our own shortcomings, but it's so easy to see somebody else's.
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I say 'here's the thing' a lot, both to alert people that I'm about to say something important and to give myself a moment to figure out what that important thing might be, because my head is so often completely empty.
