Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
ADAM GOPNIKThis alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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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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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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
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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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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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.
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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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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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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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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
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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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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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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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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.
ADAM GOPNIK