Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
-
-
What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
ADAM GOPNIK -
The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
ADAM GOPNIK -
You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs
ADAM GOPNIK -
Daniel 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 GOPNIK -
We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
ADAM GOPNIK -
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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 -
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 -
There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend
ADAM GOPNIK -
Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors
ADAM GOPNIK -
Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
ADAM GOPNIK