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.”
ADAM GOPNIKSomeone 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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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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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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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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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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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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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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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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A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
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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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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.
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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
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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?
ADAM GOPNIK