“Can't repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
“Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“...you have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.” — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense. — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky,… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
“There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think -… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
“[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… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image
I don't think there's any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that - that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes… — Adam Gopnik Copy Share Image