Adam Gopnik quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Adam Gopnik on Wise Famous Quotes.

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

Someone 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.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.

We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.

I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

I love you forever' really means 'Just trust me for now,' which is all it ever means, and we just hope to keep renewing the "now," year after year.

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

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.

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed.

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up.

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

You have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.

Nasty Men Make Nice Things; Unpleasant People Think Important Thoughts is, after all, the headline on almost every chapter in cultural history

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners.

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

When you see a Gauguin, you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man.

Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right.

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it's a good plan.

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.

...we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains.

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.