Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
ADAM GOPNIKSometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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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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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Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
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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 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