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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Adam Gopnik

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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Bad Good MIssed Missing Name Out Sometimes Think Wanting Well
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
ADAM GOPNIK

Emotional Fact Intensity Look People Photography Sleep
Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
ADAM GOPNIK

Anyone Certainty Easily Fluency Practice Pressure Think Thinking Writing
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.”
ADAM GOPNIK

Childbirth Entirely Friendship Made Marriage Stand Story Strangest Tell
Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
ADAM GOPNIK

Absence Bug Decor Essential Mind Missing Pun
All 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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Artificial Good Invented Little Quality Secret Taste
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
This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
ADAM GOPNIK

Absorption Alchemy Experience Kind Literature Reader Self Share
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

Capitalism Feel Giving Make Need Perhaps Silly Simple Sin Stuff
You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
ADAM GOPNIK

Coffee Culture Decent Food Grow Growing Together Up
I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
ADAM GOPNIK

Add Argument Infinitely Information Rock Rush Rushtling Star Web
The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
ADAM GOPNIK

Faith Fanaticism Horror People Trap Trick
I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
ADAM GOPNIK

Chance Joy Miss Missing Obligation Opinionated Regret Share
Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIK

Block Keep Often Sense Simplicity Wall Word Writing
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
ADAM GOPNIK

Art Idea Mistrust Poetry Spend Talk Talking Truth Writing Year
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Buzz Buzzing Feeling Give Giving Head Idea Merely Start Try

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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