We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
ADAM GOPNIKWe’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
ADAM GOPNIKIf 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.
ADAM GOPNIKWe don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
ADAM GOPNIKFor 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
ADAM GOPNIKI think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
ADAM GOPNIKSomeone 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.
ADAM GOPNIKI think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
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 GOPNIKLove, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
ADAM GOPNIKThe relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
ADAM GOPNIKThe 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 GOPNIKThe French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors
ADAM GOPNIKMerely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
ADAM GOPNIKThe 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 GOPNIKThe grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
ADAM GOPNIKThat they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
ADAM GOPNIK