Adam Gopnik Quotes, Sex Quotes, Writing 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.

6 years ago

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

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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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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

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.

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I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Ideas 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

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

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

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York Quotes , Coffee 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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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

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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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The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

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

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

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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

The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Autumn Quotes , Light 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

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Attitude Quotes , Party Quotes