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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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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Since
Mostly
Winning
Argument
Guy
Telling
Sound
Guys
Less
Listening
Writing
Ought
Editorial
Good
Side
Editorials
Sides
Arguing
More quotes by 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.
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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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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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.
Adam Gopnik
... 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.
Adam Gopnik
Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
Adam Gopnik
Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
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
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
I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.
Adam Gopnik
Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of I's, and a listening audience somehow turns each I into a me. This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literatur
Adam Gopnik
The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
Adam Gopnik
Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
Adam Gopnik
Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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
Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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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.
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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