The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
ADAM GOPNIKI think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The 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 GOPNIK -
Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
ADAM GOPNIK -
It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
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For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I 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 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 -
What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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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 -
Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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