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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

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Equal
Distraction
Process
Fathers
Father
Helpful
Writing
Alcohol
Something
Findings
Aided
Finding
Distractions
None
Distract
Internet
Adultery

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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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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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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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
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I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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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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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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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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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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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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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.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
Adam Gopnik
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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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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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.
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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