If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
ADAM GOPNIKI 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
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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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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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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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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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It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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 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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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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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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I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
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A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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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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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.
ADAM GOPNIK