Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnikis an American writer and essayist. He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker—to which he has contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir and criticism since 1986—and as the author of the essay collection Paris to the Moon, an account of five years that Gopnik, his wife Martha, and son Luke spent in the French capital...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
new-york coffee thinking
I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.
thinking ideas people
I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
stuff way bookstores
In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
trying stories argument
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.
years ingredients protein
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.
mind bugs essentials
Wit and puns aren't just decor 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.
light paper defined
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
thinking people journalism
I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire.
wine mean thinking
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
loneliness feelings being-free
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.
powerful mean giving
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
flavor humans human-beings
Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
crazy men thinking
Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.
swim firsts language
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.