Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIKThe blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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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 overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
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We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
ADAM GOPNIK