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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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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Many
Reminded
Writing
Active
Thurber
Heart
Sides
Elegy
Good
Age
Salinger
Eye
Reread
Faith
Mitchell
White
Ardent
Done
Malice

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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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
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The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
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Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.
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Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
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I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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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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I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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