Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
ADAM GOPNIKAll tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
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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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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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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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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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend
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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
ADAM GOPNIK