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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
White
Ardent
Done
Malice
Many
Reminded
Writing
Active
Thurber
Heart
Sides
Elegy
Good
Age
Salinger
Eye
Reread
Faith
Mitchell

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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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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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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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...
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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.
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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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In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
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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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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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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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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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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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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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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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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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.
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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 still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.
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