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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

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Shapes
Surprising
Lose
Symbols
Loses
Draw
Welter
Shape
Schematic
Drawing
Shades
Findings
Symbol
Finding
Conventions
Draws
Shade

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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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
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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
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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.
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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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
Adam Gopnik
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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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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
Adam Gopnik
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
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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We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik