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.
ADAM GOPNIKWhat 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.
ADAM GOPNIKThere 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.
ADAM GOPNIKNothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
ADAM GOPNIKIf I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
ADAM GOPNIKDinner with water is dinner for prisoners
ADAM GOPNIKThe 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 GOPNIKThis alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
ADAM GOPNIKI 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.
ADAM GOPNIKI 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 GOPNIKNew York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
ADAM GOPNIKThe scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIKWould mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
ADAM GOPNIKWriting 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 GOPNIKGoing to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
ADAM GOPNIKSomething is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.
ADAM GOPNIKIf 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