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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

Adam Gopnik

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Stuff
Way
Filed
Bookstores
Additional
Sections
Usually
Interest

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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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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I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
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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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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
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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.
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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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Frauds master our minds magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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