Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
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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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It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
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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.
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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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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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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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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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.
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The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
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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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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.
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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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If you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
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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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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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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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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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…
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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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.
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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIK