It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
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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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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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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The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors
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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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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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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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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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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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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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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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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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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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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
ADAM GOPNIK