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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.

Adam Gopnik

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Two
Exist
Together
Songs
Music
Takes
Ideas
Brain
Daniel
Mind
Song
Applies
Makes
Emotionally
Art
Sophisticated
Beautiful
Direct

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
Adam Gopnik
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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
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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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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
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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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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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
Adam Gopnik
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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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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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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
Adam Gopnik
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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
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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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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.
Adam Gopnik
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I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
Adam Gopnik