Quote

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.

Adam Gopnik

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Instinct
Seeming
Line
Card
Risk
Sought
Trumps
Player
Instruction
Perversity
Trump
Cards
Thrills
Lines
Eventually
Bending
Pleasure
Players
Uneasy
Things
Drawing
Interact

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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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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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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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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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The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
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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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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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... a fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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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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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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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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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
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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 I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
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