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

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Eerie Quotes , Space Quotes

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

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

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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

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

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Reading Quotes , Pirate Quotes

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Climate Quotes

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Crazy Quotes , Men Quotes

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

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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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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

If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent. 'Credibility' is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we'll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , People Quotes , World 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

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sex Quotes , Writing 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

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Mind Quotes , Essentials 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...

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Book Quotes , Kids 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

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Fear Quotes , Real Quotes