All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
ADAM GOPNIKThe overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.
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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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A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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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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The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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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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The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
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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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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
ADAM GOPNIK