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 GOPNIKBig writers become a kind of shared climate.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.
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Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
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The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.
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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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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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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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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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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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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
ADAM GOPNIK