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 GOPNIKFor a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
More Adam Gopnik 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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
ADAM GOPNIK -
I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
ADAM GOPNIK -
You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
ADAM GOPNIK -
A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIK -
Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
ADAM GOPNIK -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
ADAM GOPNIK -
It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I 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 GOPNIK






