Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
ADAM GOPNIKDrawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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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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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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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 think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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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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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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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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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
ADAM GOPNIK