New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
ADAM GOPNIKDrawing 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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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 if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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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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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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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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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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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Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
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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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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.
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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 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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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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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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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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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
ADAM GOPNIK