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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

Adam Gopnik

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
ADAM GOPNIK

Convention Drawing Finding Los Schematic Shade Shape Surprising Symbol Welter
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Amplification Creation Evident Mordantly Paralyzing Paranoia Preëmptive Real Self Soundtrack Towards
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

Alcohol Distract Father Finding Helpful Process Something Writing
Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
ADAM GOPNIK

Forbes Leafing Magazine Manual Operating Pirate Reading Stranger
New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
ADAM GOPNIK

Always Country Experience Memories Place Possible State Worldwide
You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
ADAM GOPNIK

Coffee Culture Decent Food Grow Growing Together Up
In 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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Age Bad Country Eye Faith Good Heart Malice People Reread Thurber Working Writing
This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
ADAM GOPNIK

Absorption Alchemy Experience Kind Literature Reader Self Share
The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
ADAM GOPNIK

British Good Institution Modern Monarchy Perhaps Political Really
A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
ADAM GOPNIK

Emotional Fact Intensity Look People Photography Sleep
The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.
ADAM GOPNIK

Eye Half Light Longing Looking Lost Minute Rise Shine Soul
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIK

Brutality Country Life Moral Scale Scandal
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Bending Drawing Instinct Instruction Player Risk Thing Those Uneasy
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
ADAM GOPNIK

Believe Country Distance Error Fault Language Simple
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Find Joy Once Said Sentiment Someone True Understand Writing
The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
ADAM GOPNIK

Back Befogged Listening might Often Past Present Still Unknowable

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

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