Adam Gopnik Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

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

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

[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.