Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
ADAM GOPNIKThat, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
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It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.
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Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
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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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If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.
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I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIK