For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.
ADAM GOPNIKIf we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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?
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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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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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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
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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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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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I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
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The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
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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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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
ADAM GOPNIK