The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
ADAM GOPNIKThe special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
ADAM GOPNIKBig writers become a kind of shared climate.
ADAM GOPNIKTomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.
ADAM GOPNIKOf 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.
ADAM GOPNIKIt 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
ADAM GOPNIKI still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
ADAM GOPNIKThat any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
ADAM GOPNIKWe call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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 GOPNIKOften the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIKDaniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
ADAM GOPNIKLose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
ADAM GOPNIKThe trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
ADAM GOPNIKAmerican long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.
ADAM GOPNIKFanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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 GOPNIK