Adam Gopnik Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Adam Gopnik's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Writer Adam Gopnik's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 2 quotes on this page collected since August 24, 1956! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

    "Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. September 12, 2011.
  • Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

    "Charlie Hebdo, The Licensed Anarchist Clowns Of French Society". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Scott Simon, www.npr.org. January 2, 2016.
  • When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

    "Facing History" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 9, 2012.
  • 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, Scott. I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.

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

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

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

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

    Source: www.newyorker.com
  • 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 (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 on Food, Baseball, and The New Yorker". Interview with David Haglund, www.slate.com. November 7, 2011.
  • Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

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

    "Get Smart" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 4, 2011.
  • I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

  • 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.

  • I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

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

    Source: www.newyorker.com
  • 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.

  • 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 (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated
  • For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique. The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know - apart from the more obvious sensual ones - is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols. Making an idea into an emotion.

    Coffee  
    Source: www.newyorker.com
  • Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

    Source: www.newyorker.com
  • ... 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.

  • 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.

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We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 2 quotes from the Writer Adam Gopnik, starting from August 24, 1956! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!