Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

“we swim in our second language, we breathe in our first”

— Adam Gopnik

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time:…

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are - the table reflects our values with a clarity…

— Adam Gopnik

“Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not…

— Adam Gopnik

“There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or…

— Adam Gopnik

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art…

— Adam Gopnik

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long,…

— Adam Gopnik

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's…

— Adam Gopnik

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment…

— Adam Gopnik

Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the…

— Adam Gopnik

“This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a…

— Adam Gopnik

“[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to…

— Adam Gopnik

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell…

— Adam Gopnik

“This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy… his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and…

— Adam Gopnik

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little…

— Adam Gopnik

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the…

— Adam Gopnik

Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found…

— Adam Gopnik

“Oliver, success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking…

— Adam Gopnik

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have…

— Adam Gopnik

“(...) a wealthy Indian princeling named Gotana (...) came to realise, after a long andmoving spiritual struggle, that people suffer because the…

— Adam Gopnik

“In Darwin's work, time moves at two speeds: there is the vast abyss of time in which generations change and animals mutate…

— Adam Gopnik

“Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city…

— Adam Gopnik

“History is not an agreed-upon fiction but what gets made in a crowded room; what is said isn't what's heard, and what's…

— Adam Gopnik

“The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that…

— Adam Gopnik

“parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass.”

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik