The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
ADAM GOPNIKThe future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
ADAM GOPNIKYou 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 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 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 GOPNIKWe breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
ADAM GOPNIKWriting well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
ADAM GOPNIKMerely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
ADAM GOPNIKSometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
ADAM GOPNIKWe call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
ADAM GOPNIKFor a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
ADAM GOPNIKLeafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
ADAM GOPNIKCredibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
ADAM GOPNIKThat they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
ADAM GOPNIKI 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 GOPNIKWhatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIKDrawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
ADAM GOPNIK