Adam Gopnik Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

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

  Adam Gopnik

  Reading, Pirate, Magazines

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Trying, Stories, Argument

  Source: www.newyorker.com

  6 Copy quote

• I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

  Adam Gopnik

  Stars, Rocks, Add

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• Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

  Adam Gopnik

  Flavor, Humans, Human Beings

  "Charlie Hebdo, The Licensed Anarchist Clowns Of French Society". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Scott Simon, www.npr.org. January 2, 2016.

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

  Adam Gopnik

  Art, Skeletons, Skills

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• 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?

  Adam Gopnik

  Art, Writing, Talking

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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• Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

  Adam Gopnik

  Drawing, Shapes, Shade

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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

  Adam Gopnik

  Education, Art, Degrees

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Faith, Art, Practice

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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• Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

  Adam Gopnik

  Writing, Climate, Kind

  "The Dragon’s Egg". www.newyorker.com. December 5, 2011.

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Father, Writing, Alcohol

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Accomplishment, Adults, Relief

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Autumn, Light, Games

  "Adam Gopnik on Food, Baseball, and The New Yorker". Interview with David Haglund, www.slate.com. November 7, 2011.

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Eerie, Space, Long

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Heart, Hands, Paris

  Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Secret, Quality, Littles

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• You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

  Adam Gopnik

  Growing Up, Coffee, Food Culture

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Sex, Writing, Self

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• Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

  Adam Gopnik

  Cooking, Sides, Showy

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  New York, Coffee, Trying

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Silly, Simple, Giving

  "Under one roof" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. September 22, 2003.

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  New York, Memories

  "Just a Bar" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 16, 2001.

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• Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

  Adam Gopnik

  Men, People, Littles

  "Fascinating history" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 9, 2012.

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• 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

  Adam Gopnik

  Long, World, Dressed Up

  Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated

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• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Sides, Ifs

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