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.”
ADAM GOPNIKIf you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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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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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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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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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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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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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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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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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There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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 special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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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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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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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