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
ADAM GOPNIKYou learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.
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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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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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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?
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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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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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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.
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Someone 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.
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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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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.
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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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I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
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The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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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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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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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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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.
ADAM GOPNIK