Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
ADAM GOPNIKCooking is the showy side of domesticity.
ADAM GOPNIKArt without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
ADAM GOPNIKNew York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
ADAM GOPNIKWould mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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 GOPNIKFanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
ADAM GOPNIKIn 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 GOPNIKBig writers become a kind of shared climate.
ADAM GOPNIKMaking an idea into an emotion.
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 GOPNIKOver all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
ADAM GOPNIKNothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
ADAM GOPNIKI think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
ADAM GOPNIKThe scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIKAll 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 GOPNIKThe future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
ADAM GOPNIK