I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
ADAM GOPNIKDinner with water is dinner for prisoners
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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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 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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
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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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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
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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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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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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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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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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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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.
ADAM GOPNIK






