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Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.

Adam Gopnik

If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.
ADAM GOPNIK

Act Cause Certain Everone Interest People Peripheral Pursuit Violently Willing World
For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I
ADAM GOPNIK

Art Idea Mistrust Poetry Spend Talk Talking Truth Writing Year
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
ADAM GOPNIK

Alive Freedom Giving Make Mean Powerful Richer Time Virtue
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Bad Good MIssed Missing Name Out Sometimes Think Wanting Well
If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
ADAM GOPNIK

Determine Exactly Full Listening might Room Stanton Still Sure Weeping
It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
ADAM GOPNIK

Again Dissect Doing First Frog Longer. Thing Memorize never Periodic Place relief Table
The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
ADAM GOPNIK

Capitalism Feel Grace Hope Material Object Possibility Stuff Urgency Want
I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
ADAM GOPNIK

Concede Devotion Fanaticism Journalism People Thinking Understand Well
Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
ADAM GOPNIK

Buzz Buzzing Feeling Give Giving Head Idea Merely Start Try
I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
ADAM GOPNIK

Agreeably Intensely More Oiontated Speak Think Thinking Writing
Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
ADAM GOPNIK

Alcohol Distract Father Finding Helpful Process Something Writing
Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
ADAM GOPNIK

Country Exactly Hand Heart Looked Sleeve Supposed
Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIK

Block Keep Often Sense Simplicity Wall Word Writing
The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
ADAM GOPNIK

Back Befogged Listening might Often Past Present Still Unknowable
Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIK

Accomplishment Adult Competence Less Professional relief Sense Sum
Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow?
ADAM GOPNIK

Ask Campus Country Liberal Little Man One People Question Truth

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.

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Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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