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.
ADAM GOPNIKWhat drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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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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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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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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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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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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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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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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