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 GOPNIKWhen 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
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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.
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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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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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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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A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK