Writing 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 GOPNIKI think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
-
-
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 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 -
Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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 -
You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The 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 GOPNIK -
Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
ADAM GOPNIK -
The 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 GOPNIK -
The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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