Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
Adam Gopnik
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Lose
Symbols
Welter
Loses
Draw
Schematic
Shape
Drawing
Shades
Findings
Symbol
Finding
Conventions
Draws
Shade
Shapes
Surprising
More quotes by Adam Gopnik
I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
Adam Gopnik
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
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
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
In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
Adam Gopnik
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
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
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
I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire.
Adam Gopnik
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
Adam Gopnik
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.
Adam Gopnik
I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
Adam Gopnik
Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
Adam Gopnik
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
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
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.
Adam Gopnik
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
You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
Adam Gopnik
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
There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
Adam Gopnik
