Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIKYou learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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 any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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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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Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
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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
ADAM GOPNIK