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.
ADAM GOPNIKLose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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
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What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.
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When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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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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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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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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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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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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Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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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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Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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.
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