Adam Gopnik Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Adam Gopnik quote about:
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“The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.”
-- Adam Gopnik -
“We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”
-- Adam Gopnik -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.”
-- Adam Gopnik -
“Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.”
-- Adam Gopnik -
“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 -
“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 -
“Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.”
-- Adam Gopnik -
“Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.”
-- Adam Gopnik -
“What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.”
-- Adam Gopnik -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.”
-- Adam Gopnik -
“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 -
“You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.”
-- Adam Gopnik -
“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 -
“In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.”
-- Adam Gopnik
