In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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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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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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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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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.
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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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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
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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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
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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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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
ADAM GOPNIK






