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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 Gopnik

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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Act Cause Certain Everone Interest People Peripheral Pursuit Violently Willing World
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
ADAM GOPNIK

Keenest Mean Meeting Restaurant Someplace Thinking Wine
In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
ADAM GOPNIK

Country Eerie Legend Library Long People Purpose Serious Shelved Space Time
Drawing 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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Bending Drawing Instinct Instruction Player Risk Thing Those Uneasy
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 GOPNIK

Burst Human Illuminated Malevolence Moneygrubbing Occasional Official Pretty Rhythm Sordid Violence
The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
ADAM GOPNIK

British Good Institution Modern Monarchy Perhaps Political Really
Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
ADAM GOPNIK

Draw Knowing Mistrust Poetry Produce Rhythm
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
ADAM GOPNIK

Argument Since Editorial Good Mostly Side Winning Writing Your
It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
ADAM GOPNIK

Answer Country Easy Grander Kill Same Thing Tonight Yourself
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Age Bad Country Eye Faith Good Heart Malice People Reread Thurber Working Writing
I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
ADAM GOPNIK

Breakfast Classic Coffee Country Meal Skip Sort Think Thinking
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Autumn Doubtless Game Imagination Kind Light Nostalgic Played Series Some World
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…
ADAM GOPNIK

Book Contemporary Kid Knowledge Literature Long Oddest Unexpected
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 GOPNIK

Alcohol Distract Father Finding Helpful Process Something Writing
I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
ADAM GOPNIK

Argument Imagination Spoken Stories Trouble Try Trying Written
Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
ADAM GOPNIK

Choice Current Easy Made Mind Mindset Music Okay Seem

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.

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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.

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