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.
ADAM GOPNIKWould mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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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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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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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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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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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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.
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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 loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
ADAM GOPNIK