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 GOPNIKIn an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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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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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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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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
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Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
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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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There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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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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Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
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The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors
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