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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

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Form
Private
Without
Gives
Giving
Becomes
Pleasure
Practice
Adherents
Common
Sustained
Faith
Intensity
Art
Accomplishment

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 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.
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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.
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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.
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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.
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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.
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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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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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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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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.
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...
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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.
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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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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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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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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.
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You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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