Adam Gopnik quotes

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. (Adam Gopnik)
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second. View quote
Adam Gopnik
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. View quote
Adam Gopnik
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. View quote
Adam Gopnik
I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity. View quote
Adam Gopnik
You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together. View quote
Adam Gopnik
There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores. View quote
Adam Gopnik
American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World. View quote
Adam Gopnik
In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch. View quote
Adam Gopnik
I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars. View quote
Adam Gopnik
All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd. (Adam Gopnik)
Cooking is the showy side of domesticity. View quote
Adam Gopnik
I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it. View quote
Adam Gopnik
In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections. View quote
Adam Gopnik
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. View quote
Adam Gopnik
The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers. View quote
Adam Gopnik
Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet. View quote
Adam Gopnik
The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games. View quote
Adam Gopnik
Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all. View quote
Adam Gopnik
Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once. View quote
Adam Gopnik
The tragedy happens-yesterday at a school in Oregon, and then as it will again-exactly as predicted, and uniquely here. It hardly seems worth the energy to once again make the same essential point that the President-his growing exasperation and disbelief moving, if not effective, as he serves as national mourner-has now made again: we know how to fix this. Gun control ends gun violence as surely an antibiotics end bacterial infections, as surely as vaccines end childhood measles-not perfectly and in every case, but overwhelmingly and everywhere that it's been taken seriously and tried at length. These lives can be saved. Kids continue to die en masse because one political party won't allow that to change, and the party won't allow it to change because of the irrational and often paranoid fixations that make the massacre of students and children an acceptable cost of fetishizing guns. (Adam Gopnik)
So there is no need to amend the Constitution, or to alter the historical understanding of what the Second Amendment meant. No new reasoning or tortured rereading is needed to reconcile the Constitution with common sense. All that is necessary for sanity to rule again, on the question of guns, is to restore the amendment to its commonly understood meaning as it was articulated by this wise Republican judge a scant few years ago. And all you need for that is one saner and, in the true sense, conservative Supreme Court vote. One Presidential election could make that happen. View quote
Adam Gopnik
Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it's in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to become frustrated and embittered old people, once the rug is pulled out from under their occupation. View quote
Adam Gopnik
The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one-the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a little more driven, the competitive one to be a little more reflective. The one artisanal, teachable thing is outer conduct. View quote
Adam Gopnik
Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry. View quote
Adam Gopnik