We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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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I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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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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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.
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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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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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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…
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
ADAM GOPNIK






