That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
ADAM GOPNIKI don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
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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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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
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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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If you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
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I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
ADAM GOPNIK