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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

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Share
Chance
Opinionated
Obligation
Miss
Regret
Missing
Joy

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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 I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
Adam Gopnik
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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...
Adam Gopnik
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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.
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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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
Adam Gopnik
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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
Adam Gopnik
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.
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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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
Adam Gopnik
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
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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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