Adam Gopnik Quotes, Father Quotes, Writing 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.

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Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

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

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

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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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful 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.

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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

6 years ago

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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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Winning 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Song Quotes

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Eerie Quotes , Space 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.

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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

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.

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

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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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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

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

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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