New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
ADAM GOPNIKWhat do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
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A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
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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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What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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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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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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When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.
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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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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.
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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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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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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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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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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.
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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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.
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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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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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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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You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
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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
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The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
ADAM GOPNIK