The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
ADAM GOPNIKWit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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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
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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You 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.”
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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For 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
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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.
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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
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