Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
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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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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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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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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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.”
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I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
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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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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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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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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?
ADAM GOPNIK