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.
ADAM GOPNIKDinner with water is dinner for prisoners
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
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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
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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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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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We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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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.
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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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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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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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIK






