Walter Kirn Quotes
A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of.
Quotes to Explore
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Twenty years ago my parents wouldn't know who the X-Men were, and now everybody knows that stuff. It means that deconstruction of the superhero is something you can do. All those movies have led to a point where we can finally have 'Watchmen' with a Superman character who doesn't want to save the world and a Batman who has trouble in bed.
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We need to have Turkey respect democracy, human rights, and fundamental freedoms.
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People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.
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I thought if I put my book up on the Internet as a file that you could download, and I told people about it, maybe some people would download it and read it, and maybe I could get some response.
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Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must be able to establish rapport with panicky callers.
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I do not deal with threats and ultimatums.
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I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.
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It didn't scare me to be vulnerable because I think that's when you get something great.
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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
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Governments and nations should sit together and resolve issues. Reforms must be reached through understanding. But others should not interfere.
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It was my very good fortune to find a mentor, Clay Felker, who started my career at the 'New York Magazine' as a freelance writer when I had to quit my job at the 'Herald Tribune' to stay home with my young daughter.
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It was very hard for me to practice and enjoy my tennis, and I didn't know the why, so I worked with psychologists to try and see what was happening. They pushed me really hard.
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Scientists at MIT and engineering schools all across America say that they could improve the fuel economy standards for the existing set of vehicles by 10 miles per gallon using existing technology, without compromising safety or comfort at all.
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I agree with cosmetic surgery for medical reasons - my mother had breast cancer and I think it's very sad when somebody has no choice in what happens to their body.
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To have success in your professional life is not so hard. To succeed as a man is more difficult.
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I try to support stories that enable us to see the difficulties in our society and the challenges we face, which is why I've also produced documentaries like 'Brick City' and 'Serving Life.'
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Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious - that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.
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No one's better than me. I'm not better than anyone. Whether it's Eric Clapton or BB King we look straight at each other. And that keeps it real.
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The demographic of our audience is young. It also contains a high proportion of black, Jewish and gay people, who have all been encouraged by society to think of themselves as oddities or mutants. I hope that's why X-Men chimes with them - it's certainly why I was attracted to the idea in the first place.
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You watched and you saw what happened and in the accumulation of episodes you saw the pattern: Daddy ruled the roost, called the shots, made the money, made the decisions, so you signed up on his side, and fifteen years later when the women's movement came along with its incendiary manifestos telling you to avoid marriage and motherhood, it was as if somebody put a match to a pile of dry kindling.
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A key ingredient to achieving your goals is to make sure your goals are totally congruent with who you are as a person. Your head and hearts desire must match. It's such an important step in goal achievement and if we miss it, we can end up travelling a long way down the wrong path!
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Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
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I first became interested in women and religion when I was one of the few women doing graduate work in Religious Studies at Yale University in the late 1960's.
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A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of.
