Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers. Adam Gopnik More Quotes by Adam Gopnik More Quotes From Adam Gopnik 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 rocks stars add 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 argument stories trying Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. Adam Gopnik height america people Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings. Adam Gopnik flavor human-beings humans 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 dressed-up long world Big writers become a kind of shared climate. Adam Gopnik climate kind writing 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 literature. Adam Gopnik self writing sex 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... Adam Gopnik long kids book 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. Adam Gopnik who-we-are behaviour tables New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them. Adam Gopnik new-york memories Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing. Adam Gopnik your-side winning writing Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment. Adam Gopnik skeletons skills art Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense. Adam Gopnik wall block writing 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. Adam Gopnik drawing risk player Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private. Adam Gopnik practice faith art Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser. Adam Gopnik degrees education art 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 said writing joy Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down. Adam Gopnik littles men people Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind. Adam Gopnik choices-made easy mind Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners Adam Gopnik prisoner dinner water
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