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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

Adam Gopnik

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Seems
Music
Hard
Made
Current
Mind
Currents
Seem
Choices
Easy

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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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
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I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
Adam Gopnik
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
Adam Gopnik
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There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
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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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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
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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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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
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World
Adam Gopnik
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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 coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
Adam Gopnik
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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
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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.
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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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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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
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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.
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