What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
ADAM GOPNIKWhatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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?
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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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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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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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.
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If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
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That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIK