Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
ADAM GOPNIKLove, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
-
-
Over 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 GOPNIK -
I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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 -
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 -
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 -
I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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 -
Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
ADAM GOPNIK -
For 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 -
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
ADAM GOPNIK -
If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
ADAM GOPNIK -
Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
ADAM GOPNIK