Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
ADAM GOPNIKIn bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
-
-
That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
ADAM GOPNIK -
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
ADAM GOPNIK -
You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
ADAM GOPNIK -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
ADAM GOPNIK -
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?
ADAM GOPNIK -
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.
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 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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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 -
We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
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
ADAM GOPNIK