Adam Gopnik Quotes, New York Quotes

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

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

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Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.

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

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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

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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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wine Quotes , Mean 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.

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

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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.

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

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... 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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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.

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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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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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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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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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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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Father Quotes , Writing Quotes