In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
ADAM GOPNIKIt mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
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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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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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Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.
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Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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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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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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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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Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
ADAM GOPNIK