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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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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Trying
Written
Make
Start
Would
Turns
Story
Imagining
Tell
Spoken
Someone
Argument
Stories
Turn
Thing
Trouble

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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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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.
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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.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
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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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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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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.
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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.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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