Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
ADAM GOPNIKIf we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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 first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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 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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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.
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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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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
ADAM GOPNIK