That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
ADAM GOPNIKI try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors
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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.
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The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
ADAM GOPNIK