Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
ADAM GOPNIKYou learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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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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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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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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If you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK