Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
ADAM GOPNIKFrauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
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The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
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I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
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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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In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
ADAM GOPNIK