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
ADAM GOPNIKOften the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
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In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
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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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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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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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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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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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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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
ADAM GOPNIK