There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
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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Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
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Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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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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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors
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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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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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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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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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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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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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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.
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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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I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
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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.
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The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I
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I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK