Adam Gopnik Quotes, Crazy Quotes, Men Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Crazy Quotes , Men Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Secret Quotes , Quality Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Two Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Light Quotes , Paper Quotes

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Cooking Quotes , Sides Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Drawing Quotes , Shapes Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Choices Made Quotes , Mind Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , America Quotes , People Quotes

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Heart Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Years Quotes , Ingredients Quotes

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Water Quotes , Dinner Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Brutality Quotes , Scandal Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York Quotes , Coffee Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Past Quotes , Listening Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wall Quotes , Block Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Eerie Quotes , Space Quotes

If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent. 'Credibility' is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we'll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , People Quotes , World Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Rewards Quotes , Spinning Quotes