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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
Makes
Emotionally
Art
Sophisticated
Beautiful
Direct
Two
Exist
Together
Songs
Music
Takes
Ideas
Brain
Daniel
Mind
Song
Applies

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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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.
Adam Gopnik
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
Adam Gopnik
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
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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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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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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Frauds master our minds magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
Adam Gopnik
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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 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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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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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
Adam Gopnik
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If you're being attacked from all sides, it's possible you're doing something right it's also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
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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Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
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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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
Adam Gopnik
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If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent. 'Credibility' is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we'll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
Adam Gopnik