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
ADAM GOPNIKThe basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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.
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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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I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
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American 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.
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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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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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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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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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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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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Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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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.
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Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
ADAM GOPNIK