Adam Gopnik Quotes, Men Quotes, People Quotes

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

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I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Regret Quotes , Joy Quotes

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing 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

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

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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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sweet Quotes , Strong 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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You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Growing Up Quotes , Coffee 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

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

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Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

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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

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

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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

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

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

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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