Adam Gopnik Quotes, Ideas Quotes, Giving Quotes

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Giving 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

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Silly Quotes , Simple Quotes

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Stars Quotes , Rocks 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

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Brutality Quotes , Scandal Quotes

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Innovation Quotes , Scarcity 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

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

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

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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

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

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Water Quotes , Dinner Quotes

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

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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I don't think there's any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that - that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Practice 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

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

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

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Light Quotes , Paper Quotes