The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
ADAM GOPNIKTomorrow 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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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
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Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
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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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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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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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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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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
ADAM GOPNIK






