Adam Gopnik Quotes, Writing Quotes, Thinking 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Fear Quotes , Real Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Hangover Quotes , Believe Quotes

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wine Quotes , Mean Quotes

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Book Quotes , Kids Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sweet Quotes , Strong 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?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Brutality Quotes , Scandal Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Magic Quotes , Mind 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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Long Quotes , World Quotes

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Reading Quotes , Pirate Quotes

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Cooking Quotes , Sides Quotes

The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York Quotes , Coffee Quotes