Adam Gopnik Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  Ideas, Giving, Feelings

  Source: www.newyorker.com

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Trying, Stories, Argument

  Source: www.newyorker.com

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Stars, Rocks, Add

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• Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

  Adam Gopnik

  Flavor, Humans, Human Beings

  "Charlie Hebdo, The Licensed Anarchist Clowns Of French Society". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Scott Simon, www.npr.org. January 2, 2016.

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

  Adam Gopnik

  Art, Skeletons, Skills

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• 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

  Loyalty, Past, Desire

  "Blows Against the Empire" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. August 20, 2007.

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Father, Writing, Alcohol

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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?

  Adam Gopnik

  Art, Writing, Talking

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Eerie, Space, Long

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• 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

  Autumn, Light, Games

  "Adam Gopnik on Food, Baseball, and The New Yorker". Interview with David Haglund, www.slate.com. November 7, 2011.

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• 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

  New York, Coffee, Trying

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Accomplishment, Adults, Relief

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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• 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

  Secret, Quality, Littles

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

  Adam Gopnik

  Growing Up, Coffee, Food Culture

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• 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

  Beautiful, Song, Art

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• Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.

  Adam Gopnik

  Sweet, Strong, Writing

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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

  New York, Memories

  "Just a Bar" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 16, 2001.

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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

  Long, World, Dressed Up

  Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Silly, Simple, Giving

  "Under one roof" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. September 22, 2003.

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Sides, Ifs

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• 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

  Men, People, Littles

  "Fascinating history" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 9, 2012.

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• 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

  Hangover, Believe, Reality

  The New Yorker, September 29, 1997.

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• Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

  Adam Gopnik

  Water, Dinner, Prisoner

  Adam Gopnik (2011). “The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food”, p.43, Vintage

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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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Past, Listening, Might

  Adam Gopnik (2009). “Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life”, p.142, Vintage

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• Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

  Adam Gopnik

  Writing, Climate, Kind

  "The Dragon’s Egg". www.newyorker.com. December 5, 2011.

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