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…
ADAM GOPNIKI still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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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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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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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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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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
ADAM GOPNIK