That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
ADAM GOPNIKThat any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
ADAM GOPNIKBig writers become a kind of shared climate.
ADAM GOPNIKOf 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 GOPNIKIn bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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 GOPNIKI don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
ADAM GOPNIKWhen handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.
ADAM GOPNIKFor a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
ADAM GOPNIKThe future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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 GOPNIKThe trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
ADAM GOPNIKWould mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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 GOPNIKIt mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
ADAM GOPNIKNothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
ADAM GOPNIKIn the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
ADAM GOPNIK