Adam Gopnik Quotes, Long Quotes, World 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

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

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

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

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Trying Quotes , Stories Quotes

For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique. The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know - apart from the more obvious sensual ones - is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols. Making an idea into an emotion.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Coffee Quotes , Unique Quotes

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

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Bookstores Quotes , Stuff Quotes

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Two 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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York 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

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

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Magic Quotes , Mind 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Men Quotes

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Choices Made Quotes , Mind Quotes

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Accomplishment Quotes , Adults Quotes

What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are - the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Behaviour Quotes , Tables Quotes

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Faith Quotes , Art Quotes

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Rewards Quotes , Spinning Quotes

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Climate Quotes