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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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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
York
Memories
Possible
Experience
Place
Without
Always
Conventionally
Precede

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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I don't think there's any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that - that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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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.
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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've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
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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.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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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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 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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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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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.
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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?
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Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
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American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World
Adam Gopnik