Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
ADAM GOPNIKMen choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
ADAM GOPNIKIn 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 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 am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
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 GOPNIKSometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
ADAM GOPNIKLose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
ADAM GOPNIKAfter all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
ADAM GOPNIKThat, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
ADAM GOPNIKOver all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
ADAM GOPNIKLove, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
ADAM GOPNIKGood editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
ADAM GOPNIKI think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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 GOPNIKThere 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 GOPNIKLeafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
ADAM GOPNIK