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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.

Adam Gopnik

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Men
Sees
Disinherited
Think
Creatures
Monarch
Thinking
Among
Wonderland
People
Choose
Monarchs
Crazy
Hamlet
Woman
Alice
Women
Creature
Every
Reasonable

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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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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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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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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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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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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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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
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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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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.
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The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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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?
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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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.
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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.
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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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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