The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
ADAM GOPNIKWriting 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
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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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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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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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.
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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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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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
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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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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.
ADAM GOPNIK