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
ADAM GOPNIKAmericans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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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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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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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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I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
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Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.
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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 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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You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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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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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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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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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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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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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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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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