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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Adam Gopnik

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Bigs
Become
Writing
Kind
Shared
Climate
Writers

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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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
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
Adam Gopnik
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Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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 literatur
Adam Gopnik
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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
Adam Gopnik
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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