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 GOPNIKIf you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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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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If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
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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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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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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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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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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
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There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK