Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

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

— 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

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

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore…

— Adam Gopnik

“I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades…

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

“She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on…

— Adam Gopnik

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between…

— Adam Gopnik

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself…

— 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

Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum; the reality…

— Adam Gopnik

I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I…

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin…

— 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

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

— 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

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

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again…

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik