You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
ADAM GOPNIKYou learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
ADAM GOPNIKFor me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.
ADAM GOPNIKI think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
ADAM GOPNIKWhat do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
ADAM GOPNIKWomen choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs
ADAM GOPNIKNew York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
ADAM GOPNIKSomeone 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 GOPNIKFanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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 GOPNIKI don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
ADAM GOPNIKArt without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
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 GOPNIKI still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
ADAM GOPNIKThe loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
ADAM GOPNIKNothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
ADAM GOPNIKA good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
ADAM GOPNIK