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 GOPNIKDrawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
-
-
Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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 -
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 -
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 -
It 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 GOPNIK -
If you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
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 -
In 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 -
I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
ADAM GOPNIK -
American 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 GOPNIK -
There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Credibility’ 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 GOPNIK -
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIK -
You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
ADAM GOPNIK -
After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIK -
Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Tomorrow 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 GOPNIK -
Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I 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 GOPNIK -
I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
ADAM GOPNIK -
This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
ADAM GOPNIK