Making an idea into an emotion.
ADAM GOPNIKMerely 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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.
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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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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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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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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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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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There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
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Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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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