Adam Gopnik Quotes, Education Quotes, Art Quotes

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Education Quotes , Art Quotes

Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum; the reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution - perhaps the first modern political institution.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Hangover Quotes , Believe Quotes

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Distance Quotes , Believe Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Secret Quotes , Quality Quotes

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Reading Quotes , Pirate Quotes

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Loneliness Quotes , Feelings Quotes

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Father Quotes , Writing Quotes

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? 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; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Men Quotes , People Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Player Quotes , Drawing Quotes

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Mean Quotes

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

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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 - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Attitude Quotes , Party Quotes

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios - 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. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. [...] That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Fear Quotes , Real Quotes

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Rewards Quotes , Spinning Quotes

I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Trying Quotes , Stories Quotes

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York Quotes , Coffee Quotes

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Men Quotes