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  • Adam Gopnik Quotes   73
  • 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Giving 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Men 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Book Quotes , Charlie Hebdo 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Heart 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Silly Quotes , Simple 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , People 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes