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 GOPNIKIf I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
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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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If 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.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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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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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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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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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK