After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
ADAM GOPNIKFor 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
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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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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I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
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When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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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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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
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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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Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
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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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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
ADAM GOPNIK






