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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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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Someone
Find
Sentiment
Writing
Sentiments
Joy
Written
Though
Understand
True

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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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.
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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Frauds master our minds magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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.
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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.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
Adam Gopnik
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In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
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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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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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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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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