All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
ADAM GOPNIKOften the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
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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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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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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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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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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
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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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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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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
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For 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
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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.
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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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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 sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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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 if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
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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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If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
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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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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
ADAM GOPNIK