Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
ADAM GOPNIKThe sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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.
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The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
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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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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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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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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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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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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American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.
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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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There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
ADAM GOPNIK