Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
ADAM GOPNIKWhat 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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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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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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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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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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Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
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It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
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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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Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs
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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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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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