Adam Gopnik Quotes, Book Quotes, Kids Quotes

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...

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Book Quotes , Kids 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

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Brutality Quotes , Scandal 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

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

6 years ago

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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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Secret Quotes , Quality Quotes

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sides Quotes

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the things that the "South Park" creators have created, like "The Book Of Mormon," the Broadway musical. If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in "The Book Of Mormon," right? It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Book Quotes , Charlie Hebdo Quotes

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Travel Quotes , Swim 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

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. 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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Silly Quotes , Simple 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

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

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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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Autumn Quotes , Light Quotes

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. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Giving Quotes

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Joy Quotes

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Song Quotes

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , People Quotes