Adam Gopnik Quotes, Autumn Quotes, Light Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Autumn Quotes , Light 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

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Stars Quotes , Rocks Quotes

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wall Quotes , Block Quotes

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Growing Up Quotes , Coffee Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Winning Quotes

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing 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

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Heart Quotes

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

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

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

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

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Crazy Quotes , Men Quotes

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sex Quotes , Writing 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

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Long Quotes , World Quotes

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sides Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , America 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