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.
ADAM GOPNIKDrawing 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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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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 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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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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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.
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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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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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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