You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
ADAM GOPNIKThis alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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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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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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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Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
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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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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
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For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.
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Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
ADAM GOPNIK