American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.
ADAM GOPNIKSomeone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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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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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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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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Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
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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.
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
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Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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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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Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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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 GOPNIK