Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
ADAM GOPNIKIt 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
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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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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Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs
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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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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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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.
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In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
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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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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
ADAM GOPNIK