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.
ADAM GOPNIKThis alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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 coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
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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 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.
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow?
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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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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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What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.
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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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A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
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In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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