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.
ADAM GOPNIKLeafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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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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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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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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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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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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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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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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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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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I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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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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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK