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  • Adam Gopnik Quotes   73
  • 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Giving 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , People Quotes , World Quotes
  • A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the things that the "South Park" creators have created, like "The Book Of Mormon," the Broadway musical. If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in "The Book Of Mormon," right? It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Book Quotes , Charlie Hebdo 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Silly Quotes , Simple 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Coffee Quotes , Unique 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?
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Hangover Quotes , Believe 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Accomplishment Quotes , Adults 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes