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
ADAM GOPNIKAmerican 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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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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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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We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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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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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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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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The 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.
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The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
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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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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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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
ADAM GOPNIK