Adam Gopnik Quotes, Writing Quotes, Heart 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Heart Quotes

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

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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

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Long Quotes , World Quotes

... a fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Photography Quotes , Sleep 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Hangover Quotes , Believe 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Player Quotes , Drawing Quotes

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

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

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Years Quotes , Ingredients Quotes

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Good Times 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Giving Quotes

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Travel Quotes , Swim Quotes

We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. 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. What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place? The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Eye Quotes , Thinking Quotes

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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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.

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

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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

Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Heart Quotes , Hands 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Distance Quotes , Believe Quotes

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Loyalty Quotes , Past Quotes