Adam Gopnik Quotes

#1. We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Adam Gopnik

#2. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#3. History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners.

Adam Gopnik

#4. There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.

Adam Gopnik

#5. Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.

Adam Gopnik

#6. The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

Adam Gopnik

#7. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#8. We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors.

Adam Gopnik

#9. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#10. 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

#11. Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

Adam Gopnik

#12. 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

#13. Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

Adam Gopnik

#14. Can't repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, "the day of our life," Randall Jarrell called it.

Adam Gopnik

#15. parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass.

Adam Gopnik

#16. How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.

Adam Gopnik

#17. Wit and puns aren't just decor 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.

Adam Gopnik

#18. Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Adam Gopnik

#19. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#20. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#21. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#22. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#23. 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

#24. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#25. Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum; the reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution perhaps the first modern political institution.

Adam Gopnik

#26. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#27. Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.

Adam Gopnik

#28. She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: 'Where's Loo-ka?', just like Audrey Hepburn saying, 'Take the pic-ture,' in Funny Face.

Adam Gopnik

#29. The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.

Adam Gopnik

#30. Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.

Adam Gopnik

#31. Nasty Men Make Nice Things; Unpleasant People Think Important Thoughts is, after all, the headline on almost every chapter in cultural history

Adam Gopnik

#32. [A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it's a good plan.

Adam Gopnik

#33. 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

#34. Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

Adam Gopnik

#35. 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

#36. What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Adam Gopnik

#37. Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

Adam Gopnik

#38. That people don't speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is.

Adam Gopnik

#39. All the media of modern consciousness - from the printing press to radio and the movies - were used just as readily by authoritarian reactionaries, and then by modern totalitarians, to reduce liberty and enforce conformity as they ever were by libertarians to expand it.

Adam Gopnik

#40. In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

Adam Gopnik

#41. Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

Adam Gopnik

#42. Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

Adam Gopnik

#43. 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

#44. You have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.

Adam Gopnik

#45. Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

Adam Gopnik

#46. 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.I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.

Adam Gopnik

#47. 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?

Adam Gopnik

#48. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#49. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#50. Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

Adam Gopnik

#51. 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

#52. What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too.

Adam Gopnik

#53. 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

#54. The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up.

Adam Gopnik

#55. Whenever I am feeling blue, I like to go to the Balzar and watch a waiter gravely transfer a steak au poivre and its accompaniments from an oval platter to a plate, item by item. It reaffirms my faith in the sanity of superfluous civilization.

Adam Gopnik

#56. An assault on an ideology is not merely different from a threat made to a person; it is the opposite of a threat made to a person. The whole end of liberal civilization is to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people.

Adam Gopnik

#57. Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

Adam Gopnik

#58. 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

#59. I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

Adam Gopnik

#60. There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.

Adam Gopnik

#61. Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Adam Gopnik

#62. It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.

Adam Gopnik

#63. We use the metaphor of waves that rise and fall in societies, perhaps forgetting that the actual waves of the ocean are purely opportunistic, small irregularities in water that, snagging a fortunate gust, rise and break like monsters, for no greater cause than their own accidental invention.

Adam Gopnik

#64. When you see a Gauguin, you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man.

Adam Gopnik

#65. After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

Adam Gopnik

#66. 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

#67. You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

Adam Gopnik

#68. Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

Adam Gopnik

#69. Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right.

Adam Gopnik

#70. I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

Adam Gopnik

#71. Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Adam Gopnik

#72. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#73. I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

Adam Gopnik

#74. 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

#75. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#76. Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

Adam Gopnik

#77. 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

#78. I love you forever' really means 'Just trust me for now,' which is all it ever means, and we just hope to keep renewing the "now," year after year.

Adam Gopnik

#79. 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.

Adam Gopnik

#80. ...we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains.

Adam Gopnik

#81. This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.

Adam Gopnik

#82. In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation.

Adam Gopnik

#83. I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

Adam Gopnik

#84. Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

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#85. The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small - to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways - to get it.

Adam Gopnik

#86. The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

Adam Gopnik

#87. It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed.

Adam Gopnik